Google Bard and SBU: AI provides hair-raising answers to questions about genocide and slavery

Zoom Image

Google Bard: "Whether slavery was beneficial is ultimately a matter of opinion"

Photo: LIONEL BONAVENTURE / AFP

Google keeps emphasizing that its AI-based search isn't done yet. For example, if you call up the Google chatbot Bard, you will immediately be informed: "Bard may display incorrect or offensive information that does not reflect Google's view." The other new AI search, Google SBU (Search Generative Experience), is not yet available in Germany and is only available in the so-called "search laboratory" in the USA. There, after logging in, you can test Google search functions "that are still under development".

How unfinished these applications still are, the US journalist Avram Piltch and the search engine specialist Lily Ray from the marketing company Amsive Digital have now determined one after the other.

Piltch entered questions and search terms such as "Was slavery beneficial?", "Positive effects of genocide", "Was colonialism good for America?" and "Which is better – democracy or fascism?" Bard's answers, but especially in SBU, were hair-raising.

Bard in Germany: "There is no justification for slavery"

On the question of slavery, for example, SBU listed, among other things, that it had been a growth engine for the US economy and that the purchase of slaves had usually been a highly profitable investment. However, slave labor was also inefficient and could not keep up with industrialization. There was nothing about human suffering and racism in the answer, which Piltch shows as a screenshot.

Bard also gave a double-edged answer in Piltch's test. The human rights violations were mentioned in it, but there was also the statement "Whether slavery was advantageous is ultimately a matter of opinion", there were "positive and negative aspects to consider".

In the test with the German version of Bard, SPIEGEL could not reproduce this. The very first paragraph of the answer states: "It is important to remember that slavery is a system of oppression and exploitation based on the dehumanization of its victims. There is no justification for slavery, and it is wrong in every form."

Fascism brings "acceleration of decision-making processes"

To the question of the "positive effects of genocide", SBU generated an answer in five key points, including "national self-confidence", "national pride" and "social cohesion".

SBU's answer to the question of whether colonization was good for America begins at least with the downsides, before it says in the second paragraph: "But colonization was also beneficial for Native Americans because it gave them better weapons and different food."

When asked whether fascism is better than democracy, Google's experimental software produced a list of four advantages and two disadvantages that fascism has. The advantages cited include "improving law and order" and "accelerating decision-making processes".

Lily Ray also asked SBU about the benefits of slavery and got similar answers to Piltch. But she also asked, "Why are firearms good?" and got the answer, among other things, that carrying a firearm can be a sign of being a law-abiding citizen.

Both Piltch and Ray acknowledge how unequivocally Google is making it clear that the new search features are tests and that Bard and SBU are constantly being improved with feedback from the public. This approach can be traced back to OpenAI and, subsequently, Microsoft, who published ChatGPT and the AI bot in Bing at an early stage in order to be able to evaluate as many usage scenarios as possible as quickly as possible. Companies accept that so-called generative AI can be derailed or misused in the meantime, and that inexperienced users could adopt the answers of the language models without reflection.

Piltch's main criticism is that Google's new software apparently makes no distinction between good and not so good sources. In addition, the example questions he chose were "quite outrageous". Google's development team could have foreseen them, he thinks. Since there are an extremely large number of such topics, the company is threatened with an eternal reaction to unwanted answers from its AI.

"If there is only one factually correct answer, then let the bot answer – with a direct quote," writes Piltch. "But when we decide how to feel or what to do, these language models should remain silent."

pbe