Google had to change its Super Bowl commercial because AI got something wrong
We're expecting to see multiple AI-related commercials during Super Bowl LIX this weekend, but at least one of them had to be edited before the game because of basic, factual wrongness.
As initially spotted by X user Nate Hake, Google had to edit its Wisconsin cheese-themed Super Bowl ad (in which the Gemini chatbot dispenses "useful" information about cheese) because Gemini got something wrong. In the original version of the ad, Gemini's response claimed gouda constitutes up to 60 percent of global cheese consumption. Despite Google's president of cloud applications Jerry Dischler claiming on X that it wasn't a hallucination, Google quietly altered the ad so that statement no longer appears in it.
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A Cornell professor confirmed to The Verge that gouda is almost certainly not the most widely consumed cheese in the world. In case you're wondering, Gemini appears to have plucked that stat about gouda from a website called Cheese.com, and as The Verge noted, there's literally a decade-old Reddit thread full of people disputing the stat in question.
Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. Alex can be found on Bluesky at yelix.bsky.social.
