The Scoop: Google called out for error-filled AI commercial. Again.

Google revised this year’s Super Bowl ad promoting its Gemini AI after a blogger challenged the company over cheese data used in the commercial.

Yes, cheese data.

The debate on X began when travel blogger Nate Hake, who has about 2,600 followers, criticized the ad.

Hake went on to point to a Wisconsin-focused segment that claimed gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.”

“Gemini provides no source, but that is just unequivocally false,” he added. “Cheddar & mozzarella would like a word.”

Google executive Jerry Dischler responded by calling Gemini’s claim an AI hallucination and said the stat came from websites it had scraped. “Gemini is grounded in the Web – and users can always check the results and references,” he wrote. “In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat.” Despite Dischler’s pushback, Google posted a revised version on YouTube. The BBC, Gizmodo, CNN, the New York Post and other major outlets later reported on the issue.

In a statement to the BBC, Google said it edited the ad after consulting the cheesemonger featured in it. “Following his suggestion to have Gemini rewrite the product description without the stat, we updated the user interface to reflect what the business would do,” the company said.

Why it matters: This situation is a prime example of why proper vetting, testing and listening is so important to any public-facing material.

Gemini got the answer wrong, plain and simple. And with a simple Google search, the makers of the commercial would have recognized that fact.

Frankly, Google should know better by now. This isn’t the first time company has struggled with ads that feature AI.

Anyone remember the tone-deaf “Dear Sydney” ad Google meant to use to highlight the power of Gemini during the Olympics? The company yanked that 60-second ad from NBC’s broadcasts after criticism of a dad helping his daughter use AI to produce a “heartfelt” letter to her Olympic hero.

Using AI presents a lot of potential pitfalls, both in the content it produces and in how people perceive those outputs. In both of these Google cases, spending a bit more time reviewing the commercials could have helped catch and avoid those PR disasters.

Both Google ads were lighthearted in nature. Is cheese popularity the most important topic in the world today? Of course not. But by not doing a little more vetting, Google unnecessarily opened Gemini, and one of the company’s top executives, to numerous negative headlines.

Moral of the story: You can’t trust AI can’t to be correct. That’s true if you’re writing a press release or making an ad for the nation’s largest TV viewing event. Proceed with caution.

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Casey Weldon is a reporter for PR Daily. Follow him on LinkedIn.