Introduction to Google’s Super Bowl Ad
This year’s Super Bowl features a controversial advertisement from Google, showcasing its AI platform, Gemini. The commercial highlights a small business owner utilizing Gemini to craft a website description for the Wisconsin Cheese Mart. However, an intriguing twist surfaces about the authenticity of the AI’s contribution.
AI Claims vs. Reality
The advertisement claims that the website description generated by Gemini is a recent creation. Yet a thorough investigation reveals that the text in question was previously available on the company’s site as far back as August 2020. This raises serious questions about the validity of Google’s marketing message; how could Gemini possibly have produced a text that already existed nearly three years prior to its launch?
Criticism of Google’s Advertising Approach
The ad was already under scrutiny for incorrectly stating that gouda cheese represents 50% to 60% of global cheese consumption. Following backlash, Google promptly retracted this claim from both the advertisement and the Wisconsin Cheese Mart website. Despite these errors, Google continues to assert that Gemini played a significant role in writing the product description for gouda cheese.
As Google Cloud Apps President Jerry Dischler stated on Twitter, the misleading statistics were not a result of AI hallucination; rather, he emphasized that Gemini is “grounded in the web.” Nonetheless, this ongoing saga highlights the importance of accurate representations in advertising, especially when leveraging advanced technologies like AI.
