BBC reports that Google had to scramble to fix its big Super Bowl advertising campaign for the company's Gemini AI tool. To show off the capabilities of the tool, Google used the Gemini AI to produce hyper-localized commercials highlighting each of the 50 US states.
The only problem, as one X user pointed out, was the AI generated some wildly hallucinatory claims in the Wisconsin-centric ad for cheese:
In Google's Wisconsin local Super Bowl ad, an AI hallucination is shown on screen:
It says Gouda accounts for "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption."
Gemini provides no source, but that is just unequivocally false
Cheddar & mozzarella would like a word 🧀
Jerry Dischler, the President of Cloud Applications for Google, replied to Hake, insisting that the Gouda factoid was not actual a hallucination, but one based on actual Google search results.
This is not true. It is so false, in fact, that Google re-edited the video and re-uploaded it to remove the reference to the overwhelming popularity of Gouda cheese. You can see that version above (because Google conveniently owns YouTube and thus controls the flow of their own information). As Ars Technica notes:
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.
Google did cannily comment on the change in a statement to The Guardian:
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.
When reached for comment by The Verge, however, Google pointed the reporter back to Dischler's comment that the mistake was not technically a hallucination.
To be fair, the 50-60% factoid was previously included on a cheese.com article about Gouda, without any actual source attached to it. So if we're being pedantic, then sure, perhaps it wasn't a hallucination, and the Gemini AI is just an idiot program regurgitating random unsourced factoids off the internet that aren't repeated anywhere else and presenting them as facts.
Update: In fact, the cheesy copy that was supposedly "generated" by Gemini AI perfectly matches a (once again, sourceless) claim that was featured on the Wisconsin Cheese Market website as recently as 2020. In which case, this gouda gaff wasn't even a hallucination; it was outright plagiarism. Which means Google's AI generator may not have actually generated anything after all.
