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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell from the tweet why the Bard response is wrong. Is it because some other instrument has taken an image of an exoplanet, or because no instrument has ever done so? ChatGPT seems to believe it is the latter.

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Another instrument took an image of an exoplanet, in 2005.

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-imag...

Your LLM needs fine-tuning, the linked article says it's 2004:

> 2M1207b is the first exoplanet directly imaged and the first discovered orbiting a brown dwarf. It was imaged the first time by the VLT in 2004.

For what it's worth, ChatGPT is also wrong: https://i.imgur.com/CsQyEc2.png. The correct answer is https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/300/2m1207b-first-imag... as techsupporter posted in a sibling comment

For what it's worth, thats not accurate - a spectrograph was used in 1995 to discover the first exoplanet by Mayor and Queloz, and they received a Nobel prize for this. So GPT is right. One can be pedantic and say that not an "image" but most would disagree.

It's not a direct image, which is the specific question, and I don't know if you're including NASA in "most" but NASA disagrees as well, per their article. So do Wikipedia editors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exopla...

i'm not a grammar expert but i think as a layperson there is a little bit of ambiguity in how a reader could interpret Bard's response. If i were writing i would probably specify "first ever picture". I think a lot of times words like "the first" are relative and context specific which the Bard answer lacks.

There is no ambiguity. We don't call Neil Armstrong "the first ever man on the moon". "The first" has a clear meaning and making any qualification of that implicit is either deceptive or bad writing.

> We don't call Neil Armstrong "the first ever man on the moon".

https://www.scout75.com/apollo-11.html#/

> On July 20, 1969 America landed the first ever man on the moon in Neil Armstrong.

i guess my take was that i find this a more excusable grammatical mistake than say getting a simple addition question wrong, which we've seen from gpt3. i could agree with "deceptive or bad writing" and maybe that's a more sinister error than something obvious wrong now that i think about it.

it's funny for me to think that i'm going out of my way to try and give Bard the same benefit of the doubt and work to try and find a way it could be right, the same way i would for a friend.

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