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, external, 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 re-edited to remove the error.

Google has posted it on YouTube, external – 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 remade the ad after speaking to the cheesemonger featured in it 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.

Accurate figures on cheese are hard to pin down – however it is thought that cheddar is in fact the most popular variety in the world, though preferences vary from country to country. Another major contender is mozzarella, external, given its use in pasta and pizza.