I Tried Google's AI Chatbot (Bard)

I tried Google's version of ChatGPT (Bard) recently. It's very similar to ChatGPT in several ways but it does have some advantages.

One of the advantages is that Bard doesn't seem to have any knowledge cutoff date. ChatGPT's knowledge cutoff is roughly in September 2021. Since ChatGPT doesn't have access to information or events that have occurred after that date its use for anything that requires current data wouldn't be reliable. There is at least one work around that I know of but adding extra steps just adds possible failure links in a chain.

Source: https://chat.openai.com

Bard does seem to have real time access to data on the internet.

Source: https://bard.google.com/

Which I can verify through the traditional Google search engine.

Source: Google search result

From what I can tell through my brief testing Bard seems to generate text just as well as ChatGPT can. The thing which Bard seems to excel at is citation. I asked Bard to generate a blog post about cryptocurrency for beginners. It did a good job with that task but without asking for it Bard listed sources at the end of the blog post it generated. ChatGPT will include sources if it is included in the prompt but I have found those sources are often incorrectly applied or just hallucinated by ChatGPT. The sources Bard gave seem legitimate and the links all go to currently existing webpages.

The tradeoff for Bard over ChatGPT seems to be the amount of text the AI model will generate. Bard's generated text content seems to average around 500-600 characters for each response. Asking Bard for longer responses doesn't seem to work. I can easily coax ChatGPT into responding with around 1100-1300 characters and sometimes even more than 3000 characters in a response.

Source: https://bard.google.com/

I also tried generating some code. The Rock Paper Scissors game Bard generated is similar to the Python code ChatGPT would generate. Apparently an advantage is that Bard's generated code can be easily exported to Google Colab. I am still learning python and I have never used Google Colab. This might be something I could use in the future so it is worth keeping in mind.

Source: https://bard.google.com/

Overall, I still prefer ChatGPT over Bard. For short explanations and current data Bard works well as a tool. As a tool for creativity ChatGPT can generate the same kind of progamming script and the longer responses are more beneficial in my opinion.