A thought on Google's #Bard incident:

Google created an online ad in which Bard made a provably false statement about the James Webb space telescope. As a result, Google appears to be losing credibility and their share price is taking a hit.

Setting aside the fact that #ChatGPT also makes numerous false statements, I think there is an important lesson to be learned from the Bard incident.

The people involved in producing the Google ad are likely intelligent professionals. They would have reviewed the ad in the course of its production. And yet they did not scrutinize Bard's statements carefully. Why not? Perhaps because the false statement was embedded with other true statements in an otherwise nice-sounding and coherent response, they just assumed it was correct. It's a natural human impulse to assign credibility this way.

But this shows the true insidiousness of these systems. They "charm" you into believing false statements. And they are very good at doing so, as the ad demonstrates.