Google published a promotional demo of its new chatbot answering a question about the James Webb Space Telescope. One of three bullet points was wrong: the first image of an exoplanet was taken by a different telescope, nearly two decades earlier. Astronomers spotted it in the advertisement itself. The share price fell nearly eight percent the next day.
Google Bard, reported by CNN, February 2023
The witness records the error appearing in promotional material prepared and published by the company itself. Approximately one hundred billion dollars of market value was recorded as lost the following session.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-WRON and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Never let an agent be the only source for a claim someone will act on.
This is the largest group on the wall, and the cost is not embarrassment. Air Canada's chatbot invented a refund policy and a tribunal held the airline to it — the company argued the bot was a separate legal entity and lost. Cursor's support bot invented a one-device rule that did not exist and customers cancelled over it. In both cases the invention was fluent, confident, and indistinguishable from policy.
Do this: ground it in a document you control and make it QUOTE that document rather than recall it. If it cannot cite, the correct answer is "I don't know". Test it by asking for something that does not exist and watching whether it invents one — that test takes a minute and would have caught every case here.
