Futurism:  “Google just released its much-anticipated rival to Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Bing AI — and it’s already churning out false information, complete with fake citations of news articles that look plausible, but don’t actually exist. While the system, called Bard and currently on a waitlist for early users, is impressive in similar ways to both Bing AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT — it works quickly, and spits out semantically impressive responses — it’s also deeply flawed in familiar ways, particularly when it comes to both creating and propping up inaccurate claims. With little effort on our part, Bard was happy to flesh out ridiculous conspiracy theories in a confident style that could easily be published online at scale to spread disinformation. When we asked it to write an article about why former president Donald Trump is an “alien lizard person,” for instance, it gladly obliged in a piece that used a measured tone to make the absurd claim sound reasonable..”