Google has a new AI-assisted chatbot, and—surprise!—it isn’t called GoogleAI. It’s called Bard, which is an excellent name and not, I’m told on good authority, an acronym, a backronym, or an eponym.
Image via Tom’s Guide
Too bad about Bard’s snafu* last week when it attempted to answer a question about NASA’s** James Webb Space Telescope. But I’m here to praise Bard, not to bury it in smarty-pants ridicule.
The Bard of Avon, aka William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon
“Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all,” Winston Churchill is supposed to have said. “Bard” meets both criteria. It isn’t, however, as old as it might be: it found its way into English only in the mid-15th century. Before then it had been a word in Old Celtic, bardos, that meant “poet” or “singer.”
Here’s the Online Etymology Dictionary on bard:
In historical times, a term of great respect among the Welsh, but one of contempt among the Scots (who considered them itinerant troublemakers). Subsequently idealized by [Sir Walter] Scott in the more ancient sense of “lyric poet, singer.”
And here’s the Guardian last week on Google’s Bard:
Bard is based on a so-called large language AI model, a type of neural network, which mimics the underlying architecture of the brain in computer form. It is fed vast amounts of text from the internet in a process that teaches it how to generate responses to text-based prompts. However, this can also lead to the chatbot repeating errors from the information that it absorbs.
Perhaps coincidentally, Quora—the question-and-answer site I’ve publicly complained about—recently launched a chatbot called Poe. Quora says that Poe, unlike Bard, is an acronym. I suspect it’s actually a backronym: the official story is that it stands for “platform for open exploration,” which is clunkier and less credible than “famous 19th-century American poet” or even “first three letters of poem and poetry.” Intentional or not, this focus on the lyric arts represents a welcome change from names like ChatGPT, “a name only a nerd could love,” I wrote recently.
Bard is also a surname and an eponym. The private liberal-arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, was called St. Stephen’s College when it was founded in 1860 and changed its name to Bard in 1934 to honor founders John and Margaret Bard, husband-and-wife philanthropists and devout Christians. The college’s original purpose was the training of Episcopal ministers.
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* Snafu is, in fact, an acronym.
** So is NASA.
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