A recent Super Bowl ad for Google Gemini has sparked controversy, raising questions about the authenticity of the AI-generated content it showcased. The advertisement, intended to demonstrate Gemini’s capabilities, seemingly presented an AI-created description for a Wisconsin cheese shop’s website. However, reports indicate that the description closely mirrored pre-existing content, raising doubts about Gemini’s actual contribution.
The issue goes deeper, involving an inaccurate claim about gouda cheese consumption and subsequent revisions to both the ad and the cheese shop’s website.
Fact-Checking the Ad: How Google Edited the Narrative
The initial controversy arose when travel blogger Nate Hake pointed out a factual inaccuracy in the Gemini-generated description: the claim that gouda accounted for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.”
Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler initially defended Gemini on X, stating that the response was “grounded in the Web” and citing multiple sites with the same statistic.
However, Google later edited the Gemini ad to remove the incorrect statistic. The cheese shop also removed the same claim from their website.
The Wayback Machine Reveals a Plot Twist
Further investigation using the Wayback Machine revealed that the smoked gouda description featured in the ad, including the incorrect gouda consumption statistic, was already present on the cheese shop’s website as far back as August 2020. This was years before Gemini’s official launch in February 2024, making it impossible for the AI assistant to have generated the original description.
Following the removal of the gouda consumption statistic, a Google spokesperson informed The Verge that the cheese shop had suggested rewriting the product description. While Google updated the ad, it still doesn’t address the question of how the original description appeared on the website years before Gemini existed.