This Gemini ad tries to pass off writing from 2020 as AI-generated

Google is apparently trying to pass off human-generated text as having been created by Gemini. As reported by The Verge, Google’s Super Bowl ad for Gemini showcases the AI’s ability to help businesses pay fewer people for creative work save time and resources by generating text for things like item descriptions. The issue? The description the ad shows Gemini generating was actually written by a person — several years ago.

The ad in question is centered around Wisconsin Cheese Mart, a real small business that, er, sells Wisconsin cheese. In the ad, Gemini whips up a “description of Smoked Gouda that would appeal to cheese lovers” — something you’d expect a LLM trained on large amounts of data to be able to do. Here’s the description:

Gouda is a Dutch cheese named after the city of Gouda in the Netherlands. It is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption. Smoked Gouda is a variant of this famous cheese, smoked in brick ovens over flaming hickory chip embers. This sweet curd is similar to Edam except that it contains more milk fat, which gives it a creamier texture and causes it to become more buttery with age. Sensational with beer, this cows milk cheese has an edible, smokey brown rind and a creamy, yellow interior.

As The Verge found, though, that description was actually present on Wisconsin Cheese Mart’s website more than four years ago, before Gemini (or any other generative AI chatbot) was commercially available. A version of the page containing the description can be seen here, as archived in August 2020.

It’s not unusual for software advertisements to show simulated UI — to depict a product in an appealing light within a 30-second video ad, you might need to take some liberties with things like processing speed. But to lift an existing, human-written item description and pass it off as something Gemini wrote is a particularly strange move from Google. Gemini actually can put together copy of this kind, so it’s not clear why Google ran with text written by a human author, much less text written by a human author for the business featured in the ad.

The text Google lifted may not even be accurate

The Verge has also pointed out that a statistic in the text originally used on Wisconsin Cheese Mart’s website and then copied and pasted by Google doesn’t seem to be correct. The description reads that gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption,” which, on its face, seems highly suspect.

Reached for comment on the notion that half of all cheese is gouda cheese, Google pointed The Verge to a tweet by Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler that insists that the 50 to 60 percent figure wasn’t a hallucination, adding that “Gemini is grounded in the Web.” That may well be, but it doesn’t have anything to do with this particular text snippet — which, again, was not written by Gemini.