Google Brain research scientist Peter J. Liu clarified that the indexing only occurred for conversations that users had elected to share, not all Bard conversations. However, Ghotra pointed out that most users wouldn't be aware that sharing a conversation meant it would be indexed by Google. Google’s Search Liaison account responded by saying they didn't intend for these shared chats to be indexed and were working on blocking them from being indexed. Despite Google's efforts to fix the issue, it has raised concerns about Bard and Google's consumer AI ambitions.
Key takeaways:
- Google's conversational AI product, Bard, has been found to index shared conversational links into its search results pages, potentially exposing private information.
- SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra discovered that these conversations could be scraped by Google’s crawler and show up publicly in its Search Results.
- Google Brain research scientist Peter J. Liu clarified that only those conversations that users had elected to share were indexed, not all Bard conversations.
- Despite Google working on a fix, the issue raises concerns about Bard and Google’s consumer AI ambitions, particularly in light of competition from other AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.