Chinese search giant Baidu defends AI research capabilities after its ChatGPT-like Ernie Bot draws a turkey for Turkey
- One influencer posted several AI-generated images, asking if Baidu simply translated the Chinese into English and used foreign image generators
- By Thursday noon, Ernie Bot could differentiate a crane bird from the machine, and did not mix up turkey and the country
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.
Art influencer Liu Dake posted several of the artificial intelligence-generated images on Wednesday night, questioning if the Baidu product simply “translated the Chinese prompt into English and put it in foreign image generators like Stable Diffusion”.
He also said Ernie Bot would by default create a white person if nationality was not specified.
Baidu asserted that its chat bot has been “totally self-developed” and that the text-to-image capabilities were trained by its Ernie-ViLG model, according to a post on its official Weibo account on Thursday.