I’m Better in an AI Chatbot’s Hallucinated World

Google’s Bard chatbot knows who I am — and now I’m motivated to be more like the person it thinks I am.

It began not so innocently as I asked Google’s AI chatbot Bard about various people I know or know of, including someone who created a scandal for themself.

I was snooping.

I wanted to know what Bard knows.

I’ve been playing a lot with ChatGPT over the past year and, in full disclosure, I prefer ChatGPT to Bard for most purposes. But Bard is connected to the Internet, which ChatGPT is not, and if you’re looking for the latest dirt on someone, then ChatGPT ain’t gonna be that helpful. So I wanted to know: What does Bard know?

Welp, as I followed the white rabbit down her twisting underground tunnel online, I wondered the inevitable: What does Bard know about me?

Yes, yes — it’s narcissistic self-interest, plain and simple. So it goes.

So: “What can you tell me about David Conner?” I asked it.

According to the Social Security Administration, there were 21,304 people named David Conner born in the United States between 1990 and 2018. This number includes people of all ages, so it is not possible to say exactly how…