WTF IS GOOGLE BARD?

Finally, a Shakespearean search engine.

Nice idea, thou gorbellied, fat-kidneyed hedge-pig, but Google Bard does much more than help you look up some of Quill Bill’s best insults. This Ai-powered chatbot uses a natural language model to answer questions in a more sophisticated and human-sounding way than a standard search engine, so you can ask complex, open questions and get more considered answers, rather than just a list of websites to trawl through. It means you can ask things like, “Is it easier to learn the guitar or the bagpipes?” rather than just factual stuff like how many strings a Telecaster has.

That’s easy, it’s six.

Well done. With brains like that you should be safe from being replaced by a robot for a few years yet. That said, Google’s first demo of Bard suggests the AI revolution isn’t exactly imminent anyway. When asked about discoveries made by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, it confidently claimed that it had taken the first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system, which a uranus of astronomers (that is the correct collective noun, right?) were quick to point out is wrong. That accolade actually belongs to the imaginatively named Very Large Telescope down here on Earth.

What an idiot! Everybody knows that…

And it’s not like the internet isn’t already full of made-up tosh, right? So actually it’ll fit right in. To begin with, Bard is only available as part of a limited beta, but Google will make it more widely available “in the coming weeks” and eventually it’ll just be part of your everyday searches. In the meantime, you can always play around with CHATGPT, which can already generate its own version of Three Blind Mice as if it were written by Shakespeare. Well, it’s always nice to have more robots to talk to, because as Menenius says in Coriolanus: “More of your conversation would infect my brain.”