Google's Gemini AI Fumbles Cheese Fact in Super Bowl Ad, Highlighting AI Accuracy Concerns

Google's AI made up a fake cheese fact that wound up in an ad for Google's AI, perfectly highlighting why relying on AI is a bad idea

First reported by Ars Technica, the "big cheese" of online search appears to have really curdled things, and in the heart of America's dairyland, no less. An ad for Google's Gemini AI that played in Wisconsin during the Super Bowl was first shown online last week with a "hallucination" -- that is to say, a bald-faced lie -- visible during a demonstration of the "writing aid." The ad was quietly edited to remove the hallucination before it went live during the big game. Apparently everybody just soft-launches their Super Bowl ads on YouTube a week in advance now, and that goes for Google's gaggle of 50 spots showcasing how Gemini could help small business owners, with a unique 30-second showcase for each state of the Union. In Wisconsin, the ad focused on a cheesemonger writing online store copy for his assorted victuals. The weirdness came partway through, when the ad actually showed Google Gemini in action. It told the cheese vendor that Gouda accounts for "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." Now, Gouda's hardly a hardcore real head pick like Roquefort or BellaVitano, but there's also no way it's pulling in cheddar or mozzarella numbers. Travel blogger Nate Hake and Google-focused Twitter account Goog Enough documented the erroneous initial version of the ad, but Google responded by quietly swapping in a more accurate Gemini-suggested blurb in all live versions of the ad, including the one that aired during the Super Bowl. Adding another wrinkle to the story, the erroneous statistic can seemingly be sourced to the Gouda page on cheese.com, an SEO-focused website with a love for cheese and a loose cannon, devil may care approach to the facts. Google Gemini will supposedly provide links to the sources it pulls from, much like AI Overview in search, and you could charitably argue that this feature just wasn't on display during the ad. But that raises other concerns: Is the ad then just pure "bullshot" like all those pre-rendered E3 game trailers of yore or all of Elon Musk's silly robots? No matter how much Gemini cites sources, isn't there something ethically questionable about an automated process presenting itself as a neutral arbiter of the internet, offering potentially rotten information as authoritative statements of fact? Google states Gemini is a "creative writing aid, not intended to be factual," and notes that suggestions from Help Me Write in Chrome "can be inaccurate or offensive since it's still in an experimental status." But that truly begs the question of who would want writing help from a program that spits out "inaccurate or offensive" information. There is also something darkly humorous to me about Google having to eat some crow due to the output of an SEO slop farm whose existence was incentivized by the company in the first place. Billions of dollars and untold amounts of compute power are being thrown at AI models, but they don't seem to be making much progress on the "hallucination" problem.

Google fumbles Gemini Super Bowl ad's cheese statistic

The incident highlights ongoing concerns about AI-generated misinformation and the need for better fact-checking Google's Gemini AI assistant fumbled an ad set to air during the Super Bowl when sharp-eyed viewers spotted a cheesy statistical error. The feel-good ad showcasing how AI can help small businesses featured a Wisconsin cheesemonger using Gemini to generate a product description for Gouda, only for the AI to confidently declare that the cheese accounts for "50 to 60 percent of global cheese consumption." However, this is a full-blown dairy debacle, as there's no evidence that Gouda is anywhere near that popular. The error was called out on social media, with plenty of cheeseheads deriding the idea that half the world's cheese supply is Gouda. Gemini had done what AI occasionally does: confidently hallucinate an absolute nonsense fact and present it as the truth. At first, Google's VP Jerry Dischler stepped in to defend Gemini, at least a little bit. He insisted the statistic wasn't an AI hallucination but came from multiple websites that Gemini had scraped for the statistic. A quick manual web search confirms that aspect, with the Gouda Illuminati apparently spreading the idea across the internet but never sourced to any actual study or census. Google's argument that "It's not our AI's fault; the internet is just full of bad information." doesn't exactly make Gemini sound as appealing as Google. Companies pay millions to get everything just right for high-profile Super Bowl ads. So Google did the only thing it could: it re-edited the ad, quietly removing the Gouda claim altogether. The new version, now posted on YouTube, keeps the friendly cheesemonger but ditches the dairy misinformation. "After the question came up about the Gouda stat, we spoke with the owner of the Wisconsin Cheese Mart to ask him how he would handle it," Google said in a statement to multiple press outlets. "Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the UI to reflect what the business would do." Even that wasn't without controversy, as people who called out the original error noted that the new video replaced the original but with the upload timestamp of the flawed ad. That's not something anyone on YouTube can do. So it suggests Google used its ownership of YouTube to finesse the new video into the slot of the original, ensuring it maintained the viewing figures and other stats, but without its erroneous gouda assumption. This isn't the first time Gemini has found itself in hot water over fact confusion. The debut of the AI model, when it was called Bard, was marred by a real-time error over astronomy, and the Google Search AI overviews had to be revamped when it briefly declared that geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day. The gouda gaffe is far from the worst mistake Gemini has made. Still, if Google wants people to trust Gemini with their lives and businesses, these kinds of errors aren't going to help. Unlike a human writer who might pause and think, "Wait, that sounds ridiculous," AI has no built-in common sense filter. It just serves up whatever it finds, and sometimes that means confidently sharing a fake cheese fact with millions of Super Bowl viewers. Gemini is supposed to be Google's answer to ChatGPT. The company has spent billions on AI development and has announced plans to invest $75 billion this year alone to keep up in the AI race. But all the computing power in the world won't matter if people don't trust what Gemini tells them. For the average person, it's a good reminder that AI still struggles with accuracy and shouldn't be the only arbiter of what gets treated as fact. Also, Gouda may be popular, but it's nothing compared to cheddar, as Monty Python made clear decades ago.

Google edits Super Bowl ad for AI that featured false information

Tech company removes error about Gouda cheese after blogger points out 'unequivocally' untrue statistic Google has edited an advert for its leading artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Gemini, before its broadcast during the Super Bowl after it was found to contain false information about Gouda cheese. The local commercial, which advertises how you can use "AI for every business", showcases Gemini's abilities by depicting the tool helping a cheesemonger in Wisconsin to write a product description, including the erroneous line that Gouda accounts for "50% to 60% of global cheese consumption". However, a blogger posted on X that the stat was an "AI hallucination" that is "unequivocally false", as more reliable data suggests that the Dutch cheese is probably less popular than cheddar or mozzarella. The blogger Nate Hake added: "I found the above AI slop example in 20 minutes, and on the first Super Bowl ad I tried factchecking." Replying to him, the Google executive Jerry Dischler said this was not a "hallucination" - where AI systems invent untrue information - but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes. He wrote: "Gemini is grounded in the web - and users can always check the results and references. In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat." In a statement, Google said it remade the ad to remove the error after speaking to the cheesemonger featured in the clip and asking him what he would have done. "Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the user interface to reflect what the business would do," the statement added. Google's AI tools have previously come under fire for containing errors or unhelpful advice. In May last year, its AI overviews search feature was criticised after it told some users to use "non-toxic glue" when they searched for "how to make cheese stick to pizza better", while AI-generated responses said geologists recommend humans eat one rock a day. Last year, Gemini was "paused" after Google conceded it "definitely messed up" after a slew of social media posts exposed how Gemini's image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures - including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers - as people of colour. The images, along with Gemini chatbot responses that vacillated over whether libertarians or Stalin had caused the greater harm, prompted negative commentary from figures including Elon Musk.

Google Had to Fix an AI Mistake in Its Super Bowl Ad

It's an accidental advertisement for AI's real feature: making stuff up. In attempting to advertise the functionality of it's AI model Gemini, Google accidentally create an advertisement for the greatest flaw of AI tools: their affinity for just making stuff up. The Verge recently caught that Google had to fix its planned Super Bowl Sunday ad promoting Gemini because the text of an answer provided by the AI model that the company is infusing into everything happened to get its information wrong. Google's ad campaign for the upcoming Big Game will focus on how small businesses across the country are using Gemini to help in their operations, with 50 different stories highlighting a different business in every state. In the Wisconsin ad, a cheesemonger uses Gemini to help write copy for his business's website. Gemini's AI-generated text says that gouda makes up “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption,†which, as it turns out, is not true. The issue was called out on Twitter by travel blogger Nate Hake, calling the stat a hallucination because Gemini did not provide a source for it. That summoned Jerry Dischler, the President of Cloud Applications at Google Cloud, into the comments to defend the ad. "Hey Nate - not a hallucination, Gemini is grounded in the Web - and users can always check the results and references," he wrote, even though no reference was cited in the text shown in the original ad. "In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat." That is true that the internet does say thatâ€"pretty much every attribution of the stat circles back to an entry on cheese.com, which does not cite any evidence for its figure. Pinning the bad info on the fact that Gemini is pulling from shaky sources is not exactly a compelling defense. Whatever happened to "Don't believe everything you read on the internet?" Alsoâ€"and this is not really relevant to anythingâ€"Dischler ended his response by saying, "Gouda news: many love this cheese! Bada news: not everyone thinks it's as grate," which just screams "I asked Gemini for cheese puns." I guess it's good he believes in his product but, woof, does he make it look so painfully uncool. Anyway, despite defending the information produced by Gemini in the ad, it appears Google has still decided to go back and tweak it. A new version of the advertisement removes the "50-60%" statistic. It's unclear if the tweak was made manually or if Google went back and gave Gemini a different prompt to make sure that figure didn't appear, but the fixed version will air during the Super Bowl. The whole incident is a much better advertisement for what you can expect out of tools like Gemini: they'll copy information fed to them with no real mechanism in place to help you figure out if it's feeding you some nonsense or not. But at least it'll save you time!

Google Edits 'Gouda' Gemini Super Bowl Ad After Cheese Fan Notices Inaccuracies

Google had to edit a Super Bowl ad for its Gemini chatbot after viewers noticed it contained misinformation about Gouda cheese. The spot was set to play during a local ad slot in Wisconsin, the state with the most cheese production in the nation. The ad aims to help small businesses use AI and shows a Wisconsin cheesemaker asking Gemini to help it write a product description for a Gouda product. The response claims that Gouda accounts for "50-60% of global cheese consumption," which is inaccurate. Gouda originates in the Netherlands and is a relatively niche cheese compared with heavy hitters like cheddar in the US or paneer in India, The Verge points out. A quick search on Google's AI Overviews says cheddar, mozzarella, and parmesan are the most popular cheeses in the world. "Cheddar and mozzarella would like a word," writes an X user who exposed Google's inaccurate ad in a post. A Google cloud executive, Jerry Dischler, responded to the post, insisting that the AI was functioning properly. He blamed "multiple sites across the web [that] include the 50-60% stat" as the reason the information surfaced within Gemini -- suggesting the AI didn't make it up. "Gouda news: many love this cheese! Bada news: not everyone thinks it's as grate," Dischler wrote. Google ultimately edited the ad to remove the offending screenshot, BBC reports, which should help it save some face in Wisconsin when the ad airs this weekend. Upon further investigation of Gouda-gate, it turns out the Gemini screenshot dates back to 2020, according to The Verge. Gemini first launched in 2023 as Google Bard, before the tech company renamed it Gemini in February 2024. It's not the first time Google's AI has struggled with cheese-related queries. Its AI Overviews famously told some of the first users that putting glue on pizza could help keep the cheese from sliding off. Nonetheless, Google is full steam ahead on its AI products. This week, it made its advanced Gemini 2.0 model available to all users and allocated $75 billion for AI infrastructure, Investopedia reports. Gouda luck.

Not Gouda-nough: Google removes AI-generated cheese error from Super Bowl ad

When Google launched its AI Overviews features last year, we noted plenty of examples of the false, misleading, and even dangerous information that can be contained in the official-looking answers generated by Google's Gemini model. Now, Google has quietly scrubbed one such falsehood from a demo of its AI writing assistant that featured prominently in an ad planned for Sunday's Super Bowl. The ad in question is part of Google's "50 stories from 50 states" promotion, which will run Gemini ads tailored for different local markets during the Super Bowl on Sunday. The Wisconsin-focused ad, as it was posted on YouTube last week, featured the owner of Wisconsin Cheese Mart asking Google's writing assistant for "a description of Smoked Gouda that would appeal to cheese lovers." The AI-authored response that was shown in that video -- and still appears verbatim on the Wisconsin Cheese Mart website -- notes that Gouda is "one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." That is almost surely an exaggeration; a 2007 Cheese Market News editorial, for instance, mentions Gouda as only the third-most-popular cheese in the world, after cheddar and mozzarella. A Global Cheese Market analyst report also only includes Gouda in the "Other Cheese" category, while mozzarella, Parmesan, and cheddar each get their own categories. The mistaken cheese factoid remained in the YouTube version of the ad until Tuesday, when social media aggregator Goog Enough (devoted to "collect[ing] and amplify[ing] bad Google SERPs and AI Overviews") noticed that the offending statistic had been removed without note. The new version of the ad simply shows Gemini calling Gouda "one of the most popular cheeses in the world," without going into specific numbers. Oddly enough, the edited version of the ad resides at the same URL as the previous version, with no indication it has been updated since being uploaded on January 30. This kind of wholesale replacement of a YouTube video at the same URL is impossible for normal YouTube users, suggesting some special privileges for Google itself were used here. The incorrect cheese info also appears to have been scrubbed from the pre-roll of Google's recent earnings call, which originally featured a run-through of the planned Super Bowl ads until yesterday.

Google's Super Bowl ad had to be changed last minute -- and it's all Gemini's fault

Super Bowl commercials are a very big deal, and reports claim that each spot can cost upwards of $8 million -- in part thanks to all the eyes that will be watching. Needless to say you make sure everything is in order, and that ad isn't going to cause any embarrassment. Hence why Google has had to change its Super Bowl commercial, thanks to its AI's horrible habit of getting things wrong. The Verge noticed Google has edited its Gemini Super Bowl ad, thanks to the AI stating an incorrect fact about cheese. Of all the ways Google AI could get something wrong, it ends up being about cheese. Specifically Gouda, which Gemini claimed "makes up "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." I'm no turophile, but even I know that Gouda is not going to be quite that popular. I'd have guessed cheddar, but Google search results suggest that it may be mozzarella. Which isn't a huge surprise, considering how popular pizza is. Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler defended the original text on X, claiming the mistake is "not a hallucination" because "Gemini is grounded in the web." Dischler even notes that Gemini results feature sources for users to check themselves, but they don't seem to be visible in the ad. The Verge speculates that this particular fact may have been pulled from a site called Cheese.com, which features lots of facts about cheese and few (if any) sources to back up the claims. This fake Gouda fact was never spoken out loud in the original ad, but it was written on screen for those who cared to look. The site also notes that the business featured in Google's ad actually had Gemini's response on its website. This text has now been altered in both cases, now declaring that gouda is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, rather than relying on actual statistics. Gemini does have a disclaimer in the ad claiming that the results are "not intended to be factual." Though that's obviously a problem. It's bad enough that Google's AI is pulling incorrect information from untrustworthy sources, but presenting that information without clearer caveats is a sure-fire way to spread misinformation. That's something you should always bear in mind when searching the web, especially if an AI is only delivering a small snippet of the available information. Because you never know if it's just feeding you some nonsense that happens to rank highly on search engine.

Google's Super Bowl Ad Accidentally Shows Its AI Simply Plagiarizing Existing Web Copy

Last week, Google released a Super Bowl ad that showed off its AI model, Gemini, generating product descriptions for a local Wisconsin cheese mart. The ad quickly drew online scrutiny, as Gemini had seemingly generated an erroneous fact about the purported worldwide fervor for gouda; it said that gouda accounts for "50 to 60 percent" of all global cheese consumption, and as an expert told The Verge, that simply isn't true. Google executives defended the accuracy of the statistic at first, before quietly editing YouTube version of the ad to correct the error (and seemingly running afoul of Google-owned YouTube's policies in the process.) But as it turns out? Gemini appears not to have even generated the product description at all. Or, if it did cook up the test, it did so by fully plagiarizing the cheese mart's existing web copy, which was published years before Gemini was even released or AI was even making much of a splash. As the Verge first reported, though the Google ad is crafted in a way that seemingly shows Gemini generating entirely new web copy for the business to use, archived versions of the cheese mart's website show that the Wisconsin business has been using the exact same product description since at least 2020. OpenAI's ChatGPT wasn't released until November 2022, and the earliest consumer-facing iteration of Google's Gemini, the text-generating chatbot it called Bard, wasn't launched until early 2023. Needless to say, the situation is beyond bizarre. Either Google faked the ad entirely, or prompted its AI to generate the web page's existing copy word-for-word, or the AI was prompted to come up with original copy and instead copied the old version. In the publishing industry, that's referred to as "plagiarism." Whatever the case, it's a bad look -- not to mention just incredibly odd. Why didn't Google just trust its own technology, which it's currently jamming into each and every product it possibly can, for a simple Super Bowl slot? When we asked Google about the retroactive editing, a spokesperson for the search giant confirmed that the ad was altered after Google took the time to consult with the cheese mart owner. "After the question came up about the Gouda stat, we spoke with the owner of the Wisconsin Cheese Mart to ask him how he would handle it," said the spokesperson. "Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the UI to reflect what the business would do." And yet! The altered ad isn't entirely different. Only the first two sentences were changed, meaning that half of the allegedly AI-generated copy was still written by a human, years before e-commerce shops would've gotten their hands on Gemini. We've reached out to Google for comment, but didn't hear back by the time of publishing.

Google quietly edits Super Bowl ad to cut glaring error by Gemini AI...

Google quietly tweaked its latest Super Bowl ad campaign after its artificial-intelligence chatbot made a bizarre claim about the popularity of Gouda cheese. The search giant's ad, which profiled small US businesses that are using Gemini AI, falsely claimed that Gouda -- a lower-profile variety versus household staples like cheddar, mozzarella and parmesan -- accounts for "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." After an outcry on social media, Google altered the spot to remove reference to the "50 to 60%." The shop featured in the ad, Wisconsin Cheese Mart, also deleted the AI-generated claim from its website, according to SFGATE. Andrew Novakovic, E.V. Baker Professor of Agricultural Economics Emeritus at Cornell University, weighed in on the matter, telling The Verge that Gouda "is almost assuredly not the most widely consumed" cheese in the world. Gemini AI didn't cite a source for the ad's claim, but according to several sites, more than half of the Netherlands' national cheese production -- as opposed to more than half of the world's consumption -- is devoted to Gouda. According to statistics from the International Dairy Foods Association, Gouda is the 12th most popular cheese in the world, ranking just behind Swiss and just ahead of Monterey Jack. Despite Google AI tweaking its Gouda assertions, Jerry Dischler, president of cloud applications at Google Cloud, doubled down, telling an X user: "Gemini is grounded in the Web - and users can always check the results and references. In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat." A Google spokesperson later told The Post that it made changes following a conversation with the cheese seller. "After the question came up about the Gouda stat, we spoke with the owner of the Wisconsin Cheese Mart to ask him how he would handle it," a Google spokesperson told The Post. "Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the UI to reflect what the business would do." The Post has sought comment from Wisconsin Cheese Mart. A possible source of Google AI's claim was a page on Cheese.com which states that Gouda is "the most popular Dutch cheese in the world, accounting for 50 to 60% of the world's cheese consumption" -- with some guessing it should have clarified, "the world's Dutch cheese consumption." The page attracted skepticism on Reddit more than a decade ago. This dustup over accuracy comes as Google is doubling down on AI-powered tools, recently incorporating Gemini into its Workspace suite and increasing the price of its subscription services. Last year, Google briefly suspended Gemini AI's image generation function after facing backlash for producing historically inaccurate and overly diverse images, such as Black Vikings, female popes and nonwhite Founding Fathers. Social media users criticized the AI as "absurdly woke" and "unusable," arguing that it distorted historical facts in an attempt to be inclusive. One widely shared example showed an AI-generated Black George Washington in a powdered wig and military uniform, while another depicted a Southeast Asian woman as a pope, despite all 266 popes in history being white men.

Google remakes Super Bowl ad after AI cheese gaffe

Google has re-edited an advert for its leading artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Gemini, after it overestimated the global appetite for Gouda. The commercial - which was supposed to showcase Gemini's abilities - was created to be broadcast during the Super Bowl. It showed the tool helping a cheesemonger in Wisconsin write a product description by informing him Gouda accounts for "50 to 60 percent of global cheese consumption". However, a blogger pointed out on X that the stat was "unequivocally false" as the Dutch cheese was nowhere near that popular. Replying to him, Google executive Jerry Dischler, insisted this was not a "hallucination" - where AI systems invent untrue information - blaming the websites Gemini had scraped the information from instead. "Gemini is grounded in the Web - and users can always check the results and references," he wrote. "In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat." The ad has now been reedited to remove the error. Google has posted it on YouTube - which it owns - and it no longer contains any reference to what percentage of the world consumes the hard cheese. In a statement, Google told the BBC it had spoken to the cheesemonger featured in the ad to ask him what he would do. "Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the UI to reflect what the business would do," the statement added.

Google Re-Edited Its AI-Generated Super Bowl Ad Because of a 'Cheesy' Fact Error

Last week, an X user posted that one of Google's new Super Bowl ads about a Wisconsin cheese market owner was "AI slop" and is "unequivocally false." In the commercial, the company's Gemini AI tool writes a product description that says, "Gouda accounts for 50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." The post has screenshots of the alleged error. Related: A Company Is Giving Away $10,000 Every Second During the Final 2 Minutes of the Super Bowl "Cheddar & mozzarella would like a word," the post continues. Google's President of Cloud Applications, Jerry Dischler, replied to the post, saying that the copy is "not a hallucination" and the stat was found in multiple places across the web. Still, as anyone who is Very Online would know, that doesn't mean the information is correct. Google confirmed that the company collaborated with the cheesemonger featured and remade the ad to remove the stat. "Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the user interface to reflect what the business would do," Google told the BBC, in a statement. The BBC notes that, for some reason, accurate data on cheese popularity is tough to source, though cheddar and mozzarella are considered to be the most popular in the world. Here's the new ad, set to run on Sunday, while the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles.

Google pulls incorrect Gouda stat from its AI Super Bowl ad

Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Google has edited Gemini's AI response in a Super Bowl commercial to remove an incorrect statistic about cheese. The ad, which shows a small business owner using Gemini to write a website description about Gouda, no longer says the variety makes up "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." In the edited YouTube video, Gemini's response now skips over the specifics and says Gouda is "one of the most popular cheeses in the world." Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler initially defended the response, saying on X it's "grounded in the Web" and "not a hallucination." The change to the ad was spotted by @natejhake on X. Andrew Novakovic, E.V. Baker Professor of Agricultural Economics Emeritus at Cornell University, confirmed to The Verge last week that Gouda "is almost assuredly not the most widely consumed" cheese in the world. Based on a quick web search, Gemini appears to have regurgitated the stat from a website called Cheese.com, which is filled with what seems to be SEO-optimized blogs. A disclaimer beneath Gemini's response says it's "not intended to be factual," but a tool framed as a writing aid for businesses should at least back itself up with reliable sources.

Google faked a Gemini AI answer in its Super Bowl commercial

As we sit around waiting for Super Bowl LIX to start, a Google commercial set to run during the big game has come under fire again. In a Super Bowl commercial theoretically designed to extoll the virtues of its Gemini AI chatbot, Google actually faked the AI part, according to The Verge. The ad, in which a business called Wisconsin Cheese Mart uses Gemini to come up with a product description for gouda, shows a paragraph-long block of text about gouda that was actually lifted directly from Wisconsin Cheese Mart's website, as seen on the Wayback Machine going back at least as far as 2020: "Gouda is a Dutch cheese named after the city of Gouda in the Netherlands. It is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption. Smoked Gouda is a variant of this famous cheese, smoked in brick ovens over flaming hickory chip embers. This sweet curd is similar to Edam except that it contains more milk fat, which gives it a creamier texture and causes it to become more buttery with age. Sensational with beer, this cows milk cheese has an edible, smokey brown rind and a creamy, yellow interior." In case you were wondering, Gemini came into existence three entire years after that block of text was written, and it is copied and pasted verbatim into the commercial as if Gemini wrote it. This starts to look even worse for Gemini when you consider that the same commercial had to be quietly edited because one part that Gemini did include on its own, a stat about gouda being the most widely consumed cheese in the world, turned out to be fake. So, in other words, the piece of Gemini text that's true was actually written by a human several years ago, and the only part of it that Gemini contributed itself was a falsehood. There has to be a better way to advertise generative AI than this.

A Super Bowl ad featuring Google's Gemini AI contained a whopper of a mistake about cheese

© 2024 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.

Google Retroactively Edits Super Bowl Ad to Remove Embarrassing Error Its AI Made

Google appears to have retroactively edited the YouTube video of an advertisement for Gemini, the company's core AI model, to remove an obvious error the AI made about the global popularity of gouda cheese. On January 30, the search giant released a Super Bowl ad promoting "Google Workspace with Gemini," which is described by the company as an AI-integrated "upgrade" to its workspace products like Docs, Sheets, and more. In the ad, a down-home Wisconsin cheese mart owner, explaining that the bulk of his business these days is done through e-commerce, discusses how helpful Gemini has been in writing web product descriptions about the various cheeses he sells. The video then shows Gemini being prompted with a request to generate a "description of Smoked Gouda that would appeal to cheese lovers." In response, the AI produces a short paragraph of copy that, amid glowing sentiments about gouda's creamy texture, confidently declares that gouda accounts for "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." X-formerly-Twitter user and travel blogger Nate Hake was quick to call this gouda claim into question. After all, though gouda is certainly popular, 50 to 60 percent of total global consumption is a lot of cheese, especially considering the immense popularity of cheeses like cheddar and mozzarella. The Verge, which first reported on the initial incident over the weekend, consulted a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University named Andrew Novakovic, who agreed that "while Gouda is likely the most common single variety in world trade, it is almost assuredly not the most widely consumed." Regardless, Google defended the AI-generated gouda assertion, with Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler even taking to X to insist that the error was "not a hallucination." "Gemini is grounded in the Web -- and users can always check the results and references. In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60 percent stat," Dischler wrote in response to Hake. "Gouda news: many love this cheese! Bada news: not everyone thinks it's as grate." (When the Verge reached out for comment, Google directed them to Dischler's X post.) It's unclear exactly what sites Dischler was referring to, but it's true that some -- including the authoritative-sounding Cheese.com -- do make that exact claim. But of course, that's the problem Google and other tech companies keep running into: when you automate the process of gathering information, it's easy enough to grab whatever information looks true and repeat it as fact, but hard to duplicate the power of a skeptical human who can evaluate a sketchy claim before putting it on their small business' website -- or into a multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad, for that matter. Regardless of its cutesy nothing-statement, it seems that Google recognizes the gravity of the error. As Hake first caught once again, it looks like Google quietly scrubbed the embarrassing mistake, which has now mysteriously disappeared from the YouTube version of the ad entirely. The description of the YouTube video doesn't denote any kind of update; it also still lists the original publish date of the ad, January 30. Before and after screenshots, though, clearly show the alteration. In addition to admitting that its AI still isn't ready for prime time, the quiet update also appears to be a remarkable exertion of Google's power as the owner of YouTube. Per YouTube policies, creators may retroactively alter or edit smaller details of uploaded videos, like the title, description, and title cards. But making major edits to the actual content of an uploaded video has long been forbidden; a substantive alteration, like the correction of a factual error stated mid-video, requires creators to upload a new clip entirely. Google, though, appears to have broken this rule for itself by uploading an edited video under the same URL. We reached out to Google for comment, but didn't hear back at the time of publishing. More on Google and AI: Google's AI Overview Believes Baby Elephants Can Sit in the Palm of a Human Hand

Google's AI Super Bowl Ad Fiasco Somehow Gets Worse

It turns out Gemini didn't hallucinate a fake stat, Google just copied a website's existing text instead. Google simply cannot escape the drama related to its Super Bowl Sunday ad campaign that is supposed to promote its Gemini AI model. What was originally thought to be a bit of hallucinated information from Geminiâ€"which would be bad all on its ownâ€"turns out to have not even come from Gemini at all. Sure, AI chatbots tend to be plagiarism machines, but this looks like it's entirely on Google. Just to catch you up: Google's planned ad buy for this year's Big Game includes 50 separate stories highlighting small businesses in all 50 states that have used Gemini tools to help their operations. The Wisconsin ad centers on a cheese store called the Wisconsin Cheese Mart. In the ad, it's suggested that the company used Gemini to generate copywriting for its website. That copy included the claim that gouda makes up “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption,†which is not true. Google took heat for this and eventually changed the text that appears in the advertisement to exclude that incorrect factoid about the cheese. Now, as it turns out, that incorrect copy wasn't even generated by Gemini despite the advertisement suggesting that it was. Thanks to the Internet Archive, we can see that the text originally purported to be generated by Gemini has been on the Wisconsin Cheese Mart website as far back as 2020. So, good news: Gemini isn't responsible for the factual error in the website copy. Bad news: Gemini isn't responsible for any of the website copy despite Google seemingly claiming that the business used the AI tool to generate the text. Making this all the more embarrassing is the fact that a Google executive publicly went to bat for the original, not-AI-generated text. Jerry Dischler, the President of Cloud Applications at Google Cloud, insisted in a back-and-forth on Twitter that the text was "not a hallucination" and that "Gemini is grounded in the Web." That may be true, but the evidence suggests that this particular example wasn't grounded in anything because it wasn't from Gemini in the first place. So now Google is in quite an awkward position. It defended its AI model for sharing false information, only for it to be revealed that the AI model didn't even generate the text. And the company was ready to spend millions of dollars to advertise the functionality of its AI suite with examples that aren't even actually from the tool itself. We're like one step away from this ad going the route of old video game trailers that would show some extremely polished-looking promotional clip with the disclaimer "not actual gameplay footage" below it. "Sure, this isn't AI-generated, but imagine if it was!"