Tech Title 'Tom's Hardware' Says It Was Plagiarized By Google Bard

Tom’s Hardware, a digital publication for PC enthusiasts, claims it was plagiarized by Google Bard and that the AI system apologized.  

Editor in Chief Avram Piltch says he asked Bard a question about “which of two competing processors — the Intel Core i9-13900K or AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D — was faster.” 

Piltch writes, “The answer it gave was taken directly from one of our Tom's Hardware articles, but Bard didn't mention the article and instead referred to the number as occurring ‘in our testing,’ implying that Google itself had done the benchmarking.” 

Piltch continues, “Anyone who has followed tech journalism for a while probably knows that Google doesn't benchmark and review CPUs, but many end users probably wouldn't question Bard's self-attribution here.” 

To prove his point, Piltch offers the following comparison:   

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Our original sentence: "In our testing, the $699 Ryzen 9 7950X3D is 12% faster than the $589 Core i9-13900K at 1080p gaming at stock settings, and 9% faster when the chips are overclocked." 

Bard's version: "The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D is faster than the Intel Core i9-13900K in gaming. In our testing, the 7950X3D was 12% faster than the 13900K at 1080p gaming at stock settings, and 9% faster when the chips were overclocked." 

When Piltch questioned Bard about the source of the testing, "it said the test results came from Tom's Hardware and, when asked if Bard had committed plagiarism, it said that, 'yes what I did was a form of plagiarism,'" he contends, posting what he says is a screenshot of the exchange. 

However, when later challenging Bard based on the screenshot, Bard responded that "the screenshot you are referring to is a fake. It was created by someone who wanted to damage my reputation." 

According to Byte, a Google spokesperson has said that Bard was “intended to generate original work, rather than copying existing material.” 

The alleged episode occurs as publishers explore legal options for obtaining payment for use of their work by Bard and ChatGPT systems, as reported last week by The Wall Street Journal.  

"We have valuable content that's being used constantly to generate revenue for others off the backs of investments that we make, that requires real human work, and that has to be compensated," Danielle Coffey, of News Media Alliance told the WSJ.  

Piltch notes that Bard is available in beta.

The Tom's Hardware article can be found here.  

 

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