Google May Have Faked a Gemini Response in Super Bowl Ad

A Super Bowl ad for Google Gemini appears to be showing an AI-generated description for a website that the assistant didn’t actually create. As reported by The Verge, the Gemini ad, which shows Gemini writing a description of smoked gouda to use on the website of a cheese shop in Wisconsin, actually copied a description that has been available on the website of the actual business for many years.

The story behind this Gemini Super Bowl ad is more complex than it seems, as Google was first caught editing the misleading ad a couple of days ago. This happened after travel blogger Nate Hake noticed in the description for smoked gouda supposedly written by Gemini the claim that Gouda accounted for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.” No disrespect for gouda fans, but that is incorrect.

After Hake accused Gemini of “hallucinating” that stat, Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler came to the rescue and said on X and said that Gemini’s response was “grounded in the Web,” adding that “multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat.”

Hey Nate – not a hallucination, Gemini is grounded in the Web – and users can always check the results and references. In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat. Gouda news: many love this cheese! Bada news: not everyone thinks it's as grate. ?

— Jerry Dischler (@jdischler) February 1, 2025

Well, Google later edited its Gemini ad to remove this incorrect stat about gouda consumption… and so did the cheese shop in Wisconsin that supposedly used Gemini to write that smoked gouda cheese description on their website.

But hang on, the story doesn’t end there.

Using the Wayback Machine, The Verge discovered that the smoked gouda description shown as generated by Gemini in Google’s ad, complete with that incorrect gouda consumption stat, was already present on the business’ website back in August 2020, four years before Google officially launched its Gemini assistant in February 2024. In other words, this cheese shop couldn’t use Gemini to write this smoked gouda description because the AI assistant didn’t exist at the time.

After Google previously edited its Gemini Super Bowl ad to remove the incorrect gouda consumption stat, a Google spokesperson told The Verge that the cheese shop suggested the company have “Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat.” The spokesperson added that Google “updated the UI to reflect what the business would do.”

That still doesn’t explain why that cheese shop apparently published the original description on their website at least four years ago without any help from Gemini. Google didn’t provide an explanation for this when The Verge asked them.