What you need to know
- Google is running ad spots that highlight how small businesses use Gemini in Workspace to grow their business.
- However, one ad became shrouded in controversy due to an incorrect statement Gemini appeared to make.
- As it turns out, the error was actually because Gemini didn't write the output — it was written by a human years earlier.
Google is running a Super Bowl marketing campaign, which highlights how 50 small businesses in 50 media markets use Gemini in Workspace to run their operations. The ads will air in the home media market of the small business highlighted in them this Sunday, Feb. 9, during the Super Bowl. However, in the case of Google's "Wisconsin Cheese Mart: Gemini in Google Docs" advertisement, it looks like the whole thing was a charade.
This specific commercial is just one of 50 that are part of the campaign, but it has been shrouded in controversy. First, it appeared that Google's Gemini AI got details in the showcase wrong. Gemini's output read that Gouda makes up "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption," which is incorrect, as spotted by The Verge. Google quietly edited the advertisement to remove the incorrect claim from Gemini's response.
The original YouTube video link is live, and you can watch the ad below — but there's no sign it was edited aside from the slew of comments criticizing Google for the swap.
Originally, critics suggested that Gemini's response may have been a hallucination. However, that doesn't seem to be the case — as Google Cloud Apps President Jerry Dischler claimed on X, saying it was "not a hallucination, Gemini is grounded in the Web."
Dischler appears to be right, but that's because Gemini never wrote the output in question at all. According to The Verge, the exact same original response allegedly written by Gemini appeared on the Wisconsin Cheese Mart's website description as early as 2020 — almost three years before Google released Gemini, then known as Bard.
The commercial still passes off the output as being written by Gemini, despite the correction. Based on this information, it's likely the incorrect fact about Gouda was not an AI misstep — it was just a human one.
Android Central asked Google why it removed the incorrect Gouda stat from the original advertisement. We also asked whether it could confirm the output said to be written by Gemini was actually written by a human, and why it was said to be created by Gemini. Google did not immediately respond to our request, but we will update this article if we hear back.
