Who would have thought years ago that today we would spend hours and hours talking to a machine? Well, probably some science fiction fans could imagine it, but with more… catastrophic consequences.
Chatbots are already a part of the daily lives of thousands and thousands of people, who talk to artificial intelligences to ask them all kinds of questions or simply to tell them about their lives.
However, the majority of people who chat with a chatbot don’t even ask themselves the question, “Are my conversations private?” It’s a somewhat complex issue that could be summarized as “yes, with some exceptions,” since conversations are used to further train AI, although companies claim that they remain private.
And that’s how it has been (in theory) until the all-powerful Google, one of the largest companies on the planet, messed up big time. According to How-To Geek, Google’s search engine is indexing users’ conversations with Bard, its AI chatbot. In other words, everything users talked about with the artificial intelligence would appear as a search result.
Apparently, the glitch is related to Bard’s feature to share conversations with other people, such as family and friends. Although this feature should not allow shared conversations to be indexed, some Twitter users have shared screenshots showing conversations of certain individuals in Google search results.
However, from what is known, very few shared conversations end up appearing in search results. Google is already aware of this Bard error and has announced that they are working to fix it and prevent indexed conversations from continuing to appear in search results.
