Google Bard announces expansion, leaves Europe behind

Google is expanding access to Bard in over 180 countries and territories across the world – but apparently the EU and Canada will not be among them.

Google hyped up its Bard expansion announcement during Wednesday's annual I/O keynote event, streamed live from its Bay View Campus in California’s Silicon Valley.

Bard’s unfurling into other nations was just a drop in the AI bucket for the company, which introduced a flurry of new products, tools, and future endeavors, during the two-hour-long event.

The revamped and more powerful Bard AI chatbot has now been integrated into pretty much all of Google's products, including a fresh take on Google Search and Workspace.

Not surprisingly, with all the razzle-dazzle being thrown at viewers, it was almost 24 hours later that someone realized EU member nations and Canada were being left out of the fray.

“We want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us,” said keynote speaker Sissie Hsiao, Google Vice President and General Manager of Google Assistant and Bard.

“So today we’re removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories — with more coming soon,” Sissie said.

Was the glaring exclusion by Google execs an innocent omission or a calculated PR strategy intended to slight over two dozen Western nations, easily representing rival ChatGPT’s biggest user base?

To compare numbers, ChatGPT had over 1 billion users in March, while Google far surpassed that amount with over 80 billion users the same month.

Canada is also listed in the top five countries for overall number of ChatGPT users according to the site SimilarWeb.

Though we can only speculate why, it seems Google may be trying to avoid likely legal battles with the EU governing body, as well as individual governments and privacy watchdog groups over data security, copyright issues, and misinformation.

Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the crowd Wednesday that misinformation and trustworthiness were among the biggest challenges facing AI today.

The AI pushback

The massive push to keep AI in check has seen robust movement among Europe even in the last month.

EU lawmakers recently reached a preliminary deal on new comprehensive rules aimed at reining in generative AI, highlighting copywriting protections.

Next, the European Data Protection Board, the umbrella organization of all EU privacy watchdogs, set up its own ChatGPT task force to create a common policy on AI privacy.

Even a call for EU consumer protection agencies to investigate AI’s potential harm to individuals was recently initiated by the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC).

Finally, the G7 intergovernmental political forum of advanced nations are also looking into "risk-based" regulations on AI.

Moreover, a handful of individual EU member nations have independently formed their own AI taskforces and begun investigations into ChatGPT data breaches and privacy violations, including Ireland, France, and Spain.

Italy, which banned the use of the app in late March for nearly a month, presented a list of data privacy demands to ChatGPT’s creator, the Microsoft-back OpenAI, in return for lifting the ban.

Italy’s privacy watchdog said ChatGPT is not compliant with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), seen as the data protection standard among Western nations.

Similar investigations into ChatGPT have been launched by the Canadian privacy commissioner.