Bard: how Google's chatbot gave me a comedy of errors

In June 2022, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine was suspended from his job after he spoke out about his belief that the company's LaMDA chatbot was sentient. "LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us," Lemoine said in a parting email to colleagues. Now, six months on, the chatbot that he risked his career to free has been released to the public in the form of Bard, Google's answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat. While Bard is built on top of LaMDA, it's not exactly the same. Google has worked hard, it says, to ensure that Bard does not repeat the flaws of earlier systems.