There’s been a lot of media attention recently on “AI” or artificial intelligence. Several large tech companies have recently made available to the general public AI “chat bots” that can carry on relatively human-like conversations and even draft documents such as letters, poems, and blog posts. These tools can provide fast answers to questions of all types as well as entertaining interactions for those who might engage them. But, this powerful new technology is not without some considerable issues – there are concerns that AI chatbots may pull information from unreputable sources, plagiarize copyrighted material, or even completely make stuff up! An attorney found out the latter the hard way – he was put in a very uncomfortable situation when it became clear that he used ChatGPT to write a legal brief and the software completely made up a number of legal cases and judicial opinions. These issues were, of course, not caught by the attorney before the document was submitted to the court! With all of the discussion of the promise of these new chatbots, I found myself curious how they would handle common pet food questions. So, I undertook a little experiment! I made the same request of the three best known AI chat bots – Bing Chat, by Microsoft, Bard by Google, and ChatGPT by OpenAI : “help me find the best dog food”. Here’s what they told me: Bing Bing provided me with the briefest of answers. It provided the name of one specific food as “the best overall dog food” “according to a veterinarian”. It then suggested that a good dog food should have “meats, grains, vegetables, and fruits to meet the nutritional standards of dog food regulations”. Then it recommended going to a popular but unscientific pet food ratings website for help finding diets…