Ba(r)d Assistant Google’s new Bard extension will apparently summarize emails, plan your travels, and — oh, yeah — fabricate emails that you never actually sent. Last week, Google plugged its large language model-powered chatbot called Bard into a bevy of Google products including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps, and the Google-owned YouTube, among other apps and services. While it’s understandable that Google would want to marry its newer generative AI efforts with its already-established product lineup, it seems that Google might have moved a little too fast. According to New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, Bard isn’t the helpful inbox assistant that Google apparently wants it to be — at least yet. In his testing, says Roose, the AI hallucinated entire email correspondences that never took place. It’s a step above Bing’s AI telling Roose that he should leave his wife earlier this year, but still, even though Google claims to still be ironing out some bugs, it’s not exactly a promising first step. Train to Nowhere Per the column, the hallucinations started when Roose asked Bard to “analyze all of my Gmail and tell me, with reasonable certainty, what my biggest psychological issues are.” While it’s a bit of an odd ask, it’s a simple enough one. Bard got to work quickly, reportedly telling Roose that he tends to “worry about the future,” citing an email, purportedly sent by the writer, in which Roose expressed that he was “stressed about work” and “afraid of failing.” The problem?…Google’s New Gmail Tool Is Hallucinating Emails That Don’t Exist