By AJ Dellinger Published February 7, 2025 | Comments (0) | Gemini welcome screen displayed on an Android smartphone Florence Ion/Gizmodo Google simply cannot escape the drama related to its Super Bowl Sunday ad campaign that is supposed to promote its Gemini AI model. What was originally thought to be a bit of hallucinated information from Geminiwhich would be bad all on its ownturns out to have not even come from Gemini at all. Sure, AI chatbots tend to be plagiarism machines, but this looks like its entirely on Google. Just to catch you up: Googles planned ad buy for this years Big Game includes 50 separate stories highlighting small businesses in all 50 states that have used Gemini tools to help their operations. The Wisconsin ad centers on a cheese store called the Wisconsin Cheese Mart. In the ad, its suggested that the company used Gemini to generate copywriting for its website. That copy included the claim that gouda makes up 50 to 60 percent of the worlds cheese consumption, which is not true. Google took heat for this and eventually changed the text that appears in the advertisement to exclude that incorrect factoid about the cheese. Now, as it turns out, that incorrect copy wasnt even generated by Gemini despite the advertisement suggesting that it was. Thanks to the Internet Archive, we can see that the text originally purported to be generated by Gemini has been on the Wisconsin Cheese Mart website as far back as 2020.So, good news: Gemini isnt responsible for the factual error in the website copy. Bad news: Gemini isnt responsible forany of the website copy despite Google seemingly claiming that the business used the AI tool to generate the text. Making this all the more embarrassing is the fact that a Google executive publicly went to bat for the original, not-AI-generated text. Jerry Dischler, the President of Cloud Applications at Google Cloud, insisted in a back-and-forth on Twitter that the text was not a hallucination and that Gemini is grounded in the Web. That may be true, but the evidence suggests that this particular example wasnt grounded in anything because it wasnt from Gemini in the first place.So now Google is in quite an awkward position. It defended its AI model for sharing false information, only for it to be revealed that the AI model didnt even generate the text. And the company was ready to spend millions of dollars to advertise the functionality of its AI suite with examples that arent even actually from the tool itself. Were like one step away from this ad going the route of old video game trailers that would show some extremely polished-looking promotional clip with the disclaimer not actual gameplay footage below it. Sure, this isnt AI-generated, but imagine if it was!Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Isaac Schultz Published February 6, 2025 By Thomas Maxwell Published February 6, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published February 5, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published February 5, 2025 By Matt Novak Published February 5, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published February 4, 2025