ChatGPT is a conversational AI platform, while Google Bard is a self-proclaimed “experiment”. Which AI tool is bringing more to the table?
When ChatGPT was launched, many questioned the future of Google’s world-renowned search engine. It promised a more streamlined and focused search along with accurate and fast results. You wouldn’t have to scour through tens of pages (although there are millions; but let’s be honest, who has the time for that?). While ChatGPT works for us, it has left Google’s future hanging in the balance.
So, in a very on-brand move, Google decided to launch its iteration of ChatGPT, departing from its previous conversation tech platform LaMDA. Released in March 2023, Google Bard was born to compete with ChatGPT, Open AI’s thriving generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool. The company dubbed Bard a “creative collaborator” in line with ChatGPT’s success in content creation.
Here, we compare the two tools based on accuracy, reliability, features and more to discover the better AI.
Battle of the Bard vs. ChatGPT: Features
Like ChatGPT, Bard is a generative AI platform, but here’s how it distinguishes itself. For one, it lets users easily export text from the AI to Google Docs and Gmail. If you’ve used ChatGPT, you know that a simple Copy-Paste doesn’t cut it because ChatGPT highlights all of its text in black. Moreover, Bard plans on enabling AI image generation by teaming up with Adobe.
On the other hand, we’ve got ChatGPT, the more established player in the field, renowned for its powerful language generation capabilities. It supports multiple languages and finds applications in various domains, such as drafting emails, writing code and creative composition. ChatGPT excels at maintaining context over extended conversations and has an extensive knowledge base, making it a valuable tool for research and information retrieval. Plus, it now offers plug-ins, including the web browser and code interpreter, enhancing its versatility and integration with different platforms. Its user-friendly interface further adds to its appeal.
Availability and accessibility
Until May 2023, Bard was available in the U.S. and the UK. Now, it is also available in Australia. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is available across multiple countries, from the U.S., Germany and Australia to India, Mexico, Austria, Cuba and more. Besides, ChatGPT has also recently launched an app, which is currently only available for iOS users in the U.S., Europe, South Korea, New Zealand and more.
In terms of language support, Bard currently offers three languages, including English, Japanese and Korean, and wants to expand to 40 languages. On the other hand, ChatGPT is available in about 95 languages. Still, neither is particularly great at translating English into other languages.
Accuracy
A glaring concern with AI chatbots is their tendency to get things wrong. ChatGPT has been pulled up for failing at basic math and providing incorrect information, and even going so far as gaslighting you into believing that it is correct.
Google’s Bard is no better. In fact, Google’s chatbot embarrassed the company at a public event when it got an answer wrong. When asked which satellite was the first to photograph plants outside Earth’s solar system, it said James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) when the correct answer was the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). This goof-up caused Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to lose US$100 billion in market value. Safe to say, neither one-ups in the other in case of accuracy just yet.
What’s more, both have been blamed for hallucinating answers, sort of like a student trying to beef up a 1,000-word essay with lengthy arguments supporting made-up facts. When researchers asked two versions of ChatGPT where an MIT professor was born, both gave conflicting answers. The debate ended with one ChatGPT apologizing to the other. Moreover, in one instance, a New York lawyer used fake cases generated by ChatGPT in court and now faces potential sanctions.
Presenting sources
An issue with chatbots, like ChatGPT and even Jasper AI, has been their inability to provide sources. While they provide well-written information, there would be no way to check whether it is correct or from reliable sources, besides using Google or Bing to cross-check. However, Bard is changing that, launching a new update that shares the sources for its information. Though it makes a case for its transparency, it is not too different from ChatGPT in that these sources can be fake.
Ethics and bias
Besides getting the facts wrong, many have brought up concerns related to bias with regard to generative AI tools. Bard and ChatGPT attempt to remain neutral, but it’s challenging, even for AI, not to let biases slip through occasionally. Some feel that ChatGPT is not afraid of revealing its political biases now and then (it wrote a poem about Joe Biden but refused to do so for Donald Trump). These biases reflect the data both tools have been trained on, perhaps even rubbishing rumors that Bard is trained using ChatGPT’s data.
Ethics have also been a point of contention for these tools. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company promotes ethical behavior in Bard by watermarking images and providing metadata so that it does not misuse data and reduces the possibility of displaying non-factual information.
Compared to ChatGPT, Google has the upper hand with established systems, like Google Lens and Google Docs, to integrate into Bard. Reports suggest that Bard will capitalize on the Google Lens platform in the future, encouraging users to share photos as they would in the search engine and ask Bard to produce captions based on the visuals. Currently, ChatGPT does not support images, but Open AI has DALL-E to pick up the slack. However, if Bard offers everything in one place, it might just one-up ChatGPT.
Essentially, it appears that Bard is set up to be a more advanced version of the Google search engine. Plus, it is set up to become hyper-localized, offering responses based on users’ precise locations—something ChatGPT doesn’t do just yet. However, ChatGPT’s greater accessibility and availability are putting up an intense fight against Google’s Bard. It will be some time before we can say for sure which AI is better.
Also read:
- ChatGPT and Dall-E: Is Generative AI Threatening Creativity?
- Will ChatGPT-Powered Bing Finally Get a Chance to Replace Google?
- The Chatbot Revolution: Meet the Top Up-and-Coming Competitors to OpenAI’s ChatGPT
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