Google quietly tweaked its latest Super Bowl ad campaign after its artificial-intelligence chatbot made a bizarre claim about the popularity of Gouda cheese.
The search giant’s ad, which profiled small US businesses that are using Gemini AI, falsely claimed that Gouda — a lower-profile variety versus household staples like cheddar, mozzarella and parmesan — accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.”
After an outcry on social media, Google altered the spot to remove reference to the “50 to 60%.” The shop featured in the ad, Wisconsin Cheese Mart, also deleted the AI-generated claim from its website, according to SFGATE.
Andrew Novakovic, E.V. Baker Professor of Agricultural Economics Emeritus at Cornell University, weighed in on the matter, telling The Verge that Gouda “is almost assuredly not the most widely consumed” cheese in the world.
Gemini AI didn’t cite a source for the ad’s claim, but according to several sites, more than half of the Netherlands’ national cheese production — as opposed to more than half of the world’s consumption — is devoted to Gouda.
According to statistics from the International Dairy Foods Association, Gouda is the 12th most popular cheese in the world, ranking just behind Swiss and just ahead of Monterey Jack.
Despite Google AI tweaking its Gouda assertions, Jerry Dischler, president of cloud applications at Google Cloud, doubled down, telling an X user: “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.”
A Google spokesperson later told The Post that it made changes following a conversation with the cheese seller.
“After the question came up about the Gouda stat, we spoke with the owner of the Wisconsin Cheese Mart to ask him how he would handle it,” a Google spokesperson told The Post.
“Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the UI to reflect what the business would do.”
The Post has sought comment from Wisconsin Cheese Mart.
A possible source of Google AI’s claim was a page on Cheese.com which states that Gouda is “the most popular Dutch cheese in the world, accounting for 50 to 60% of the world’s cheese consumption” — with some guessing it should have clarified, “the world’s Dutch cheese consumption.”
The page attracted skepticism on Reddit more than a decade ago.
This dustup over accuracy comes as Google is doubling down on AI-powered tools, recently incorporating Gemini into its Workspace suite and increasing the price of its subscription services.
Last year, Google briefly suspended Gemini AI’s image generation function after facing backlash for producing historically inaccurate and overly diverse images, such as Black Vikings, female popes and nonwhite Founding Fathers.
Social media users criticized the AI as “absurdly woke” and “unusable,” arguing that it distorted historical facts in an attempt to be inclusive.
One widely shared example showed an AI-generated Black George Washington in a powdered wig and military uniform, while another depicted a Southeast Asian woman as a pope, despite all 266 popes in history being white men.
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