Google search chief warns AI chatbots can give 'convincing but completely fictitious' answers, report says

•     Google's search engine boss said AI chatbots can give "convincing" but "fictitious" answers.

•     Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt am Sonntag it's considering how to integrate Bard with Google search.

•     Google felt the "urgency" to release its chatbot Bard to the public, he said.

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ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs. Here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace.

•   ChatGPT is only a few months old and already causing waves in the business world.

•   Experts say ChatGPT and related AI could threaten some jobs, particularly white-collar ones.

•   Insider compiled a list of 10 jobs this technology could replace, according to experts.

Since its release in November of last year, OpenAI's ChatGPT has been used to write cover letters, create a children's book, and even help students cheat on their essays.

The chatbot may be more powerful than we ever imagined. Google found that, in theory, the search engine would hire the bot as an entry-level coder if it interviewed at the company.

Amazon employees who tested ChatGPT said it does a "very good job" of answering customer support questions, is "great" at making training documents, and is "very strong" at answering queries around corporate strategy.

However, users of ChatGPT also found that the bot can generate misinformation, incorrectly answer coding problems, and produce errors in basic math.

While a 2013 University of Oxford study found that 47% of US jobs could be eliminated by AI over the next 20 years, that prediction appears to have been off-base.

Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, said that's because human judgement still needs to be applied to these technologies to avoid error and bias, she told Insider.

"We have to think about these things as productivity enhancing tools, as opposed to complete replacements," Madgavkar said.

Insider talked to experts and conducted research to compile a list of jobs that are at highest-risk for replacement by AI.

Google's search chief has warned against relying on AI chatbots to always produce accurate information.

Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt Am Sonntag on Saturday that they can sometimes give false but convincing answers.

"This kind of artificial intelligence that we are currently talking about can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination," he told the German newspaper.

He added: "This is then expressed in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely fictitious answer."

On Monday Google used a presentation to unveil its AI chatbot called Bard that it hopes will rival ChatGPT.

However, an ad for Bard showed it giving an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.

Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet fell sharply in the wake of the error and rising fears about the threat posed by ChatGPT to its search dominance.

Raghavan told Welt Am Sonntag that Google felt the "urgency" to release Bard to the public, "but we also feel the great responsibility. We definitely don't want to mislead the public."

"We are considering how to integrate these possibilities into our search functions, especially for the questions to which there is not only a single answer," he added.

Raghavan's comments come after some criticized Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai for the "rushed" and "botched" launch of Bard.

Maarten Bosma, a former research engineer at Alphabet's AI division Google Brain, tweeted that the presentation showed the company wasn't taking AI seriously enough.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider made outside normal working hours.

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