Google AI chatbot Bard offers inaccurate information in company ad

Google published an online advertisement in which its much anticipated AI chatbot Bard delivered an inaccurate answer.

The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a "launchpad for curiosity" that would help simplify complex topics.

In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?"

Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate.

The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It announced the launch of Bard on Monday.

At the time of writing, the ad had been viewed on Twitter more than 880,000 times.