- A Google ad campaign showcasing how small businesses use its AI instead reminded many that the technology makes up facts when it included a wrong statistic about Gouda cheese. The now-corrected ad initially claimed that the Dutch cheese made up the majority of cheese consumed worldwide.
It’s not as bad as suggesting putting glue on your pizza, but Google’s AI still seems to have trouble getting its cheese facts straight.
A Super Bowl ad meant to highlight “new and incredible ways [Google customers] use AI to transform how they work” instead has the internet talking about AI’s propensity for making things up.
The company recently released 50 videos—one for each state—featuring customers using its Workspace software suite, enabled by Google’s Gemini AI. In an ad featuring Wisconsin Cheese Mart, the owner says, “Oh, my gosh, I am the worst writer ever,” and asks Gemini for help describing Gouda cheese.
In an early version of the ad, Google’s copy claims that Gouda “is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.”
Except that’s “unequivocally false,” as travel blogger Nate Hake first noted on X, quipping, “Cheddar & mozzarella would like a word.”
Global figures remain elusive. But in the U.S., mozzarella is far and away the most popular cheese, according to Matt Herrick of the International Dairy Foods Association, who cited U.S. Department of Agriculture figures, thanks to its status as a pizza topping. It’s followed by cheddar at No. 2 and then cream cheese. Gouda doesn’t even crack the list of the top 10, USDA data show.
“While Gouda is likely the most common single variety in world trade, it is almost assuredly not the most widely consumed,” Andrew Novakovic, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, told The Verge. Novakovic guessed that Indian paneer or the fresh cheeses produced in South America and the Near East would be the most popular globally.
Google didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s questions about the figure. But the company initially defended the ad. “Hey Nate—not a hallucination,” Jerry Dischler, Google’s president of cloud applications, posted on X this week. “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.”
Since then, however, the ad has been quietly edited to remove the number, and Wisconsin Cheese Mart, which initially touted the incorrect figure on its website, has since removed it from the copy, The Verge reported. The site and the ad now note that “Gouda, a Dutch cheese, is one of the most popular cheeses in the world.”
“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. Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the UI to reflect what the business would do,” Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson told Fortune in an email Friday. “To clarify, the AI didn’t hallucinate, it drew on a website that was wrong.”
While Google and its Big Tech competitors Meta and Microsoft have been touting the promise of generative AI, the technology still makes plenty of errors. AI researcher and psychologist Gary Marcus this week noted that ChatGPT, the flagship product of OpenAI, still can’t come up with a list of 50 U.S. states in one try or correctly identify a vowel.
“As against all the constant claims of exponential progress that I see practically every day, ChatGPT still seems [like] pretty much the same mix of brilliance and stupidity that I wrote about, more than two years ago,” Marcus wrote.
In a final recursive coda, the whole episode has now been incorporated into Google’s web search. A user trying to learn how popular Gouda is globally would not find a number, but would be told that the 50-60% figure “is inaccurate and should be treated with caution,” and that “a recent Google ad featuring AI mistakenly stated this figure.”
