That Time Google Quietly Edited Its AI Answer In Its Super Bowl Ad Because It Wasn’t Accurate

Some people this weekend will watch the Super Bowl to enjoy the game, but many others will turn it on to see the best TV commercials that an ad agency can come up with for the time in between the plays. It’s become standard practice these days for most commercials to debut online before the big game, which is probably good news for Google since their ad was wrong.

With AI being a hot-button topic of the day, we can bet that like NFTs and crypto before it, a number of Super Bowl ads will be dedicated to promoting it. Such is the case with Google, who last week released a commercial about its Gemini AI tool that showed the owner of a cheese shop in Wisconsin using it. In the ad, the shop owner uses AI to write descriptions for different cheeses for his e-commerce site. Unfortunately, in relying on AI, he seems to have gotten some information wrong.

An eagle-eyed viewer of the ad on X (formerly Twitter) spotted Gemini’s AI “hallucination” which claimed that gouda made up “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption." That would make it the most used cheese in the world, which is quite a claim.

Google initially defended the ad, as X users pointed out, claiming that multiple sites used the stat, which may be true but doesn’t change the fact that the stat is wrong.

Google has now quietly changed the commercial and no longer uses incorrect information, as you can see below. Interestingly, the video hasn’t been reuploaded, simply changed, with the same date stamp, causing some online to cry foul.

Wisconsin - Wisconsin Cheese Mart: Gemini in Google Docs - YouTube

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Not everybody is a fan of AI. Not everybody is a fan of the “art’ created by AI. It can certainly create accurate images if you tell it to make The Boys characters in the style of Pixar or the X-Men as Disney heroes. However, a big criticism of the technology is the fact that despite its name, it does not know everything, and does not give accurate information all the time. Therefore, mistakes like what happened in this Google ad can happen.

While most AI tools, including Gemini, include disclaimers that state that the information provided may not be accurate, it's not a good look when the information is wrong.

There will probably be a lot of ads for AI when the Super Bowl airs on the 2025 TV schedule this Sunday. It wouldn't shock me if right now they're being reviewed to ensure their accuracy. Now, it will be interesting to see how this discourse continues when the big game happens and if any other ads for AI contain errors like this one that's now fixed.