Google's new AI bot Bard just debuted and it's already warning about its creator's 'monopoly' over ads

• Google just dropped Bard on Tuesday, and the AI bot is already game to even take on the tech giant.
• It declared that Google has "a monopoly on digital advertising technologies."

Google's new Bard chatbot is already taking its own creator to task, apparently warning about Google's power over the ads market to users who ask about it.

In screenshots of an exchange tweeted on Tuesday by Jane Manchun Wong, a technology blogger based in Hong Kong, Bard seemed to sympathize with the US Department of Justice in its ongoing antitrust suit against Google over digital ads.

"The Justice Department's lawsuit against Google is an important step in protecting competition and ensuring that consumers have access to a fair and open market," Bard responded, according to a screenshot of a response that Wong posted.

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—Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) March 21, 2023

The interaction appeared to be addressing a lawsuit filed in January by the DOJ and a number of state attorneys general. Their civil complaint had essentially argued that Google muscled its way to power over digital advertisers and made them dependent on it.

Google responded in a statement at the time, saying that the government's case boiled down to choosing "winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector."

"No one is forced to use our advertising technologies — they choose to use them because they're effective," Dan Taylor, Google's vice president of global ads, said in a statement in January. "In fact, publishers and advertisers typically work with multiple technologies simultaneously to reach customers and make more money."

A Google representative told Insider in a statement that AI bots like Bard can "can reflect positive or negative views of specific politicians, celebrities or other public figures, or even incorporate views on certain sides of controversial social or political issues into their responses."

"As we've said, Bard can sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information that doesn't represent Google's views and Bard should not respond in a way that endorses a particular viewpoint on subjective topics," the statement said.

Insider repeated Wong's question in our own test of Bard, and received similar responses — Bard offers different answers to the same question, called "drafts," as Insider previously reported. In multiple versions of its responses, Bard repeated that "I would side with the Justice Department in this case."

AI chatbots can sometimes deliver factually incorrect information, experts including OpenAI's own chief technology officer Mira Murati have said.