If Google's Bard chatbot seems really smart, that could be because it's copying data from expert sources, without giving them so much as a citation. Today, I asked Bard, which is available in beta at bard.google.com, a question about which of two competing processors — the Intel Core i9-13900K or AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D — was faster. 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.
When I questioned Bard about the source of the testing, it said that the test results came from Tom's Hardware and, when I asked if it had committed plagiarism, it said that "yes what I did was a form of plagiarism." A screenshot of the exchange is below.
