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.