Google’s and Microsoft’s chatbots are making up Super Bowl stats

February 12, 2024

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If you needed more evidence that GenAI is prone to making stuff up, Google’s Gemini chatbot (formerly Bard) thinks that the 2024 Super Bowl already happened. It even has the (fictional) statistics to back it up.

Per a Reddit thread, Gemini, powered by Google’s GenAI models of the same name, is answering questions about Super Bowl LVIII as if the game wrapped up yesterday or weeks before. Like many bookmakers, it seems to favor the Chiefs over the 49ers — sorry, San Francisco fans.

Gemini embellishes creatively, in at least one case giving a player stats breakdown suggesting that Kansas Chief quarterback Patrick Mahomes ran 286 yards for two touchdowns and an interception versus Brock Purdy’s 253 running yards and one touchdown.

Image Credits: /r/smellymonster (opens in a new window)

It’s not just Gemini. Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, too, insisted that the game ended and provided citations (albeit erroneous) to back up the claim. But — perhaps reflecting a San Francisco bias! — it said the 49ers, not the Chiefs, emerged victorious “with a final score of 24-21.”

Image Credits: Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch

It’s all rather silly — and possibly fixed by now, given that this reporter had no luck replicating the Gemini responses in the Reddit thread. But it also illustrates the major limitations of today’s GenAI — and the dangers of placing too much trust in it.

GenAI models have no real intelligence. Fed an enormous number of examples usually sourced from the public web, AI models learn how likely data (e.g. text) is to occur based on patterns, including the context of any surrounding data.

This probability-based approach works remarkably well at scale. But while the range of words and their probabilities are likely to result in text that makes sense, it’s far from certain. LLMs can generate something that’s grammatically correct but nonsensical, for instance — like the claim about the Golden Gate. Or they can spout mistruths, propagating inaccuracies in their training data.

It’s not malicious on the LLMs’ part. They don’t have malice, and the concepts of true and false are meaningless to them. They’ve simply learned to associate certain words or phrases with certain concepts, even if those associations aren’t accurate.

Hence Gemini’s Super Bowl falsehoods.

Google and Microsoft, like most GenAI vendors, readily acknowledge their GenAI isn’t perfect and is, in fact, prone to making mistakes. But these acknowledgements come in the form of small print I’d argue could easily be missed.

Super Bowl disinformation certainly isn’t the most harmful example of GenAI going off the rails. That distinction probably lies with endorsing torture or writing convincingly about conspiracy theories. It is, however, a useful reminder to double-check statements from GenAI bots. There’s a decent chance they’re not true.

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