Google was forced to edit a Super Bowl advert for its AI tool Gemini after the tool falsely claimed that gouda accounts for 50-60 percent of global cheese consumption.
The ad was set to premiere during the US National Football League Super Bowl games, showcasing small business owners from each US state using Gemini to support their specific needs. One of these examples includes the owner of a Wisconsin cheese shop.
After asking Gemini to describe gouda cheese, the AI tool inaccurately generates the fact that it accounts for “50-60 percent” of cheese consumption globally.
This overestimation of the cheese’s popularity was caught by a blogger on X, who stated that the statistics in the commercial were “unequivocally false.”
In response to the blogger, Jerry Dischler, president of Google Cloud applications, explained the misinformation was not due to a ‘hallucination’ – AI generating false or misleading responses – but a result of false facts on websites Gemini scrapes for data.
“In this case,” Dischler responded in a post on X, “multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat.”
Despite this justification, Gemini has received criticism for its inability to discern incorrect figures from accurate ones.
This instance reflects concerns surrounding the validity of AI-generated responses. Even with the advancement of AI systems, there remains the issue of hallucinations.
Companies like Amazon have attempted to decrease hallucinations through approaches like automated reasoning, or using mathematical logic to fine-tune the functions of AI systems. However, no AI tool has successfully blocked hallucinations completely.
While Dischler assured that Gemini had not been hallucinating, the commercial was tweaked to include a more vague fact, that “Gouda, a Dutch cheese, is one of the most popular cheeses in the world.”
