David De Cremer is the Dunton Family Dean and a professor of management and technology at D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s search chief, was preparing for the Paris launch of its much-anticipated artificial intelligence chatbot in February last year when he received some unpleasant news.
Two days earlier, his chief executive, Sundar Pichai, had boasted that the chatbot, Bard, “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses”. But, within hours of Google posting a short gif video on Twitter demonstrating Bard in action, observers spotted that the bot had given a wrong answer.