Sounded Gouda, But Wasn’t: Google Gemini Completely Fumbles AI Super Bowl Ad

Football fans are gearing up for the biggest weekend of the year, with Super Bowl LIX scheduled to take place this coming Sunday. And while they’ll be glued to the action on the gridiron, plenty of other viewers will be tuning in to check out all the big-budget commercials. This being 2025, you can absolutely bet on a whole lot of companies advertising all their cutting-edge AI tech. It shouldn’t be any surprise to hear that Google has cooked up some ad spots of its own, but it turns out that the company has already been betrayed by its own AI.

Last week, Google posted a preview of its Super Bowl campaign on X, highlighting small business across the country that use Gemini AI tools in Workspace. In fact, Google produced a separate video for each and every state. And almost immediately, eagle-eyed viewers like Nate Hake spotted a pretty glaring AI error that one of these ads featured on-screen (via The Verge):

Play Google’s Wisconsin ad now, and everything’s fine: Our cheesemonger asks Gemini to come up with “a description of Smoked Gouda that would appeal to cheese lovers,” and Google’s AI model pops out a suitable blurb. Only the one you see in the ad now is not the Gemini response Google initially included:

It doesn’t take an encyclopedic knowledge of cheeses for that “over half the world’s cheese consumption is Gouda” claim to immediately sound pretty suspicious. Don’t get us wrong: Gouda is some good eating. But it’s also not a type we hear mentioned nearly as much as varieties like cheddar or mozzarella. Nevertheless, Google Vice President and General Manager of Ads Jerry Dischler jumped on X to defend Gemini, claiming that the response was “grounded in the Web” and that “multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat.”

Well, The Verge managed to track down at least one of those websites, and surprise, surprise: it was full of unsourced, seemingly low quality SEO-driven content.

Somewhere along the line, Google appears to have accepted that this was a bad look for the company, and has now quietly edited the ad after consultation with the featured business owner. It’s not hard to understand why Google doesn’t seem to want to bring any extra attention to its mistake, but maybe the company needs to start taking Gemini’s “not intended to be factual” disclaimer to heart.

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