I have no idea what Google thinks of you, but I know what it thinks of Power Line, and of me. Because I asked Google Bard, the company’s new artificial intelligence application. Google Bard is described by ZDNet here.

I did this because a friend emailed me a disparaging description of Alpha News generated by Google Bard. So I asked, “Is Power Line a reliable news source?” This is the answer I got. It is factually incorrect in almost every detail:

Power Line is a conservative news and commentary website that was founded in 2005 by Erick Erickson, John Hinderaker, and Scott Johnson.

I have no idea where this came from. Erick Erickson has never had anything to do with Power Line.

[John goes on to detail a number of other instances of false claims, but oh, I don’t know … I think it’s really accurate!

[I think this demonstrates that AI has the same limitations as any other computing does — garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). I recognize a lot of the text in my example; some of it’s from Wikipedia, and some of it derives from praise written by others at various times about my work. John and the PL guys — who are all my friends — have had a lot of nasty and untrue things written about them. Like ChatGPT, Bard seems to operate in large part as a front-end normal-language search function for Wikipedia and other text sources on the Internet. But definitely you should trust the results when it comes to me. 🙂 — Ed]