Chinese tech giant Baidu, which last week launched its ChatGPT alternative Ernie Bot, said on Thursday that the product was “totally self-developed” after some users expressed concerns that the company may have copied its chatbot’s text-to-image capability from overseas.
Hilarious images generated by the Ernie Bot started to surface online earlier this week, as users found the chatbot drew a turkey, the bird, when asked for the country Turkey, and a crane - the bird - instead of the machine used for lifting heavy objects. These images were generated in spite of the Chinese-language prompts and use of completely different characters for each word.