Google’s advertising mistake cost it US$100 billion. Who’s to blame?

When an advertisement goes terribly wrong who’s to blame? That surely must have been the question at Google after the launch of its new AI tool Bard.

An accompanying online advertisement showed the Chatbot wrongly answering a simple question, saying the James Webb Space Telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the earth’s solar system when that milestone was truly claimed by the European Very Large Telescope in 2004.

While there were doubtless other contributing factors, share value of parent company Alphabet dropped by $100 billion, and lost further value next day.

As British astronomer Chris Harrison commented: “Why didn’t you fact-check this example before sharing it?” Which is a fair question.