Sep 22, 2023
Google’s New Gmail Tool Is Hallucinating Emails That Don’t Exist
Posted by Kelvin Dafiaghor in categories: mapping, robotics/AI
Google’s new Bard extension will apparently summarize emails, plan your travels, and — oh, yeah — fabricate emails that you never actually sent.
Last week, Google plugged its large language model-powered chatbot called Bard into a bevy of Google products including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps, and the Google-owned YouTube, among other apps and services. While it’s understandable that Google would want to marry its newer generative AI efforts with its already-established product lineup, it seems that Google might have moved a little too fast.
According to New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, Bard isn’t the helpful inbox assistant that Google apparently wants it to be — at least yet. In his testing, says Roose, the AI hallucinated entire email correspondences that never took place.