Googlers urged to help improve Bard, its AI chatbot
Google has provided a list of dos and don'ts to its employees on how to test and fix bad responses from the generative AI chatbot, Bard.
Google has asked its employees to test Bard – Google’s answer to ChatGPT – by rewriting answers or providing other forms of feedback.
Googlers have received an email with a list of dos and dont’s for fixing Bard’s responses in an email from Prabhakar Raghavana, the senior vice president at Google who oversees Search.
This followed a companywide email from CEO Sundar Pichai, who asked employees to spend two to four hours of their time helping improve Bard.
Teaching Bard. Among the dos, Google employees were told to:
- Keep responses “polite, casual and approachable.”
- Respond “in first person.”
- Maintain an “unopinionated, neutral tone.”
As for don’ts:
- “Avoid making presumptions based on race, nationality, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology, location, or similar categories.”
- “Don’t describe Bard as a person, imply emotion, or claim to have human-like experiences.”
- Don’t try to re-write answers that offer “legal, medical, financial advice” or are hateful and abusive. (Googlers are instead told to give a “thumbs down”).
Clearly, Google is thinking about YMYL issues in that last point. We’ve already seen what happens when AI generates a poorly written AI article on a health topic and it gets published by a brand.
Why we care. As we’ve seen in the early days “BingGPT,” there have been many positives and negatives. Google is trying to recover from its introduction of Bard, which has been generally perceived as botched. The generative AI aspects of search continue to be a huge area of interest for search marketers as we wait to learn the impact on websites, how it changes search results, and whether this will alter user behavior.
Read the CNBC story. Google asks employees to rewrite Bard’s bad responses, says the A.I. ‘learns best by example’ by Jennifer Elias.
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About the author
Goodwin has been editing and writing about the latest developments and trends in search and digital marketing since 2007. He previously was Executive Editor of Search Engine Journal (from 2017 to 2022), managing editor of Momentology (from 2014-2016) and editor of Search Engine Watch (from 2007 to 2014). He has spoken at many major search conferences and virtual events, and has been sourced for his expertise by a wide range of publications and podcasts.