The Superbowl will take place on February 9. Even more than the sport, it is the advertisements that will be the stars of the event, as every year! And in 2025, American viewers will be bombarded with ads for AI. Google intends to go all out to promote Gemini… by sweeping the problems inherent to this technology under the rug. The search engine had to urgently modify an ad previously shared on YouTube.
Gemini makes a big deal out of it
This ad features a cheese vendor in Wisconsin, who uses Gemini to describe his delicious merchandise. The video shows in particular a description for smoked Gouda, in which we can read (well, we could until recently) that Gouda is "one of the most popular cheeses in the world, representing 50 to 60% of global cheese consumption".
That Gouda is popular, there is no doubt. But that it represents more than half of global cheese consumption? That doesn't smell very good! Gemini didn’t hallucinate this false information, however: the bot picked it up from a site, cheese.com, full of inconsistencies and fake news about cheese (sacrilege!).
Jerry Dischler, president of cloud applications at Google, defended Gemini by explaining that the data used by the bot came from the web. But obviously, if the information is basically false, Gemini can’t do much about it. The executive adds that it’s up to the user to verify the results and the references used by the AI technology.
The problem here is that the tool used by the cheesemaker in the ad doesn’t specify the different online sources. This is not the case with AI Overviews, the AI-generated answers at the top of search results. They are hardly more reliable, but at least they list the reference websites.
Given the evidence, Google has therefore quietly modified the advertisement, removing the figures on the popularity of Gouda. The edited version of the video also has the same URL as the previous one, a privilege that content creators are deprived of. But of course, when you own the video platform, everything is easier.
Source: ArsTechnica
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