Invites to test Bard and the New Bing arrived within 24 hours of each other. The Bard invite arrived first, and I must admit to being underwhelmed. Bard was boring. I had heard the rumors that Google’s secret AI was leaps and bounds ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, convincing at least one engineer of sentience. However, the experience was largely dull.

What is the purpose of Bard?

As alterative to regular search, Bard does not immediately offer up a convincing reason to stick with its services. The results take a little longer to generate and do not contain URLs. When searching for places to eat in Chicago, I had to independently Google Bard’s text results. Bard suggested two excellent options that met my criteria, but then suggested options that made little sense. I can see one potential future here, and that is in Augmented Reality, where Bard is a competitor to Alexa – vocalizing responses to my spoken requests. But this is only going to have value if Bard can demonstrate accuracy and link to actual resources on the internet.

Welcome To The New Bing

New Bing is something else. It took a few clicks to access the new Bing (started up in Safari, did not like being in the Microsoft Edge Dev, but worked like a dream in the regular Edge) and it felt like I was in Las Vegas, which is both good and bad.

Conversational Style

I was impressed that the new Bing (NuBing?) suggested a choice of conversational style: Creative, Balanced, or Precise. Somewhat ironically, I found myself Googling how to try the new features.

Kitten and Dinosaur

AI image generation (Image Creator) is baked into chat and initially works surprisingly fast and well. I was unable to get a widescreen image even though Bing told me it could change the aspect ratio of the results, and my request for a “dinosaur riding a kitten” was churned out as a kitten riding a dinosaur. But it did it fast. On a day where ChatGPT was up and down (and lacking historical chats) this was particularly impressive. Subtly, Bing was counting up to a limit of 15 with each image request. With only a few credits left, I asked for an image of a kitten dressed as Judge Dredd. Bing Binged itself with a search of Wikipedia and spat out some acceptable results.

Judge Kitten

I have no idea if these search results are being piped into the image prompt, but I like to think they are.

So, I will definitely be using the New Bing. Bard, not so much.

For kicks, here are some of the images that Bing was able to create.

A steampunk armadillo

Kitten and Dinosaur 1

Kitten and Dinosaur 2

Kitten and Dinosaur 3

An image of James Moore (who works at DePaul University) riding on the back of a kitten