Is Google’s Bard chatbot crossing some legal boundaries? : says Kate Crawford

Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 Google has launched the first version of its AI chatbot Bard. Users can now join a waitlist to gain access to Bard, users can use Bard to boost their productivity, accelerate their ideas, and fuel and curiosity.

However, within hours of its launch Bard got caught in a controversy where it answered a query on where Bard’s dataset comes from, it added Gmail to its answers.

Bard replied by saying –

“Bard’s dataset comes from a variety of sources, including:

Publicly available datasets: These include datasets of text and code from the web, such as Wikipedia, GitHub, and Stack Overflow.

Google’s internal data: This includes data from Google Search, Gmail, and other products.

Data from third-party companies: This includes data from companies that have partnered with Google to provide data for Bard’s training.”

Umm, anyone a little concerned that Bard is saying its training dataset includes… Gmail?

I'm assuming that's flat out wrong, otherwise Google is crossing some serious legal boundaries. pic.twitter.com/0muhrFeZEA

— Kate Crawford (@katecrawford) March 21, 2023

This soon sparked concern across the internet, with Google being questioned over privacy concerns.

Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford first shared the conversation with Bard, in which she asked the chatbot where its data sets came from.  Taking to Twitter to share the conversation, Crawford wrote, “Umm, anyone a little concerned that Bard is saying its training dataset includes… Gmail? I’m assuming that’s flat out wrong, otherwise Google is crossing some serious legal boundaries.”

Google was quick to counter the claims saying in a response to Crawford’s post. Google Workplace wrote, “Bard is an early experiment based on large language Models and will make mistakes. It is not trained on Gmail data.”

Despite this, Crawford attempted to verify whether or not Bard’s response was indeed a “hallucination” and that it had not been trained on any Gmail data, but she received no response from the Company.

Crowford later alleged that Google had deleted a tweet in response to her post that claimed no private data was used in training of Bard. To support her claim, she shared a screenshot of the tweet. In the Tweet in Google workplace has assured her that “No private data will be shared during Barbs training process. We always take good care of our user privacy and security.”

Google has made its bard Chatbot available to users in US and UK by signing a waitlist at bard.google.com. The chatbot is Google’s answer to ChatGPT, the viral conversational chatbot that currently dominates the AI chatbot category.