Just like ChatGPT, Google Bard can now help write and debug software code

By Divyanshi SharmaA couple of days back, in an interview, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had promised that their AI chatbot, Bard, will be getting some upgrades and will get batter with time. And recently, in light with the CEO’s statements, Google announced that Bard can now help in writing code and debugging it as well. Not only this, the AI chatbot can even explain code to users and can also assist with writing functions for Google Sheets. Until now, ChatGPT was known for helping to write code but looks like Google is keen on catching up with competition. Bard is available to a handful of users in the US and UK and is still in its testing phase.

Google announces Bard’s new powers

The blog post announcing Bard’s new powers mentions that coding has been ‘one of the top requests’ that the company has received from its users.

Talking about Bard’s abilities, the blog post reads, “Starting now, Bard can help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and code explanation. We’re launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python and Typescript. And you can easily export Python code to Google Colab — no copy and paste required. Bard can also assist with writing functions for Google Sheets.”

Adding how Bard can also help in explaining code, the post adds, “In addition to generating code, Bard can help explain code snippets for you. This is particularly helpful if you’re learning about programming for the first time, or if you need some additional support to understand what a block of code might output.”

On possibility of hallucinating

By this point, we have heard about the AI chatbot’s tendency to ‘hallucinate’ quite a lot. Hallucination in AI is said to occur when it presents wrong information confidently, making the user believe it to be true.

Google’s blog post about Bard also warns about the AI chatbot’s possibility to hallucinate.

It reads, “Bard is still an early experiment, and may sometimes provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently. When it comes to coding, Bard may give you working code that doesn’t produce the expected output, or provide you with code that is not optimal or incomplete. Always double-check Bard’s responses and carefully test and review code for errors, bugs and vulnerabilities before relying on it. Despite these challenges, we believe Bard’s new capabilities can help you by offering new ways to write code, create test cases, or update APIs. If Bard quotes at length from an existing open source project, it will cite the source.”

What do Google employees think about Bard?

In February, when Bard had just been launched, reports surfaced that the employees were not happy with the way the announcement was handled and were calling it ‘rushed, botched, and un-Googley’. The company then sought help from its employees to fix Bard’s mistakes, announcing incentives for employees who agreed to do so. CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that over 80,000 employees helped test Bard internally and even thanked them via an email.

More recently, according to Bloomberg, some Google employees who tested out Bard were not really happy with the AI chatbot and called it ‘useless’ and a ‘pathological liar’. An employee also warned that Bard’s advice in certain cases could lead to ‘death or injury’.

The publication reported viewing an internal document as per which, 18 current and former Google employees said that Bard was giving out low quality information ‘in a race to keep up with the competition’ while giving ‘less priority to its ethical commitments’.