from Hacker News

Google edits Super Bowl ad for AI that featured false information

by nemoniac on 2/7/25, 12:25 PM with 80 comments

by uSoldering on 2/9/25, 1:10 PM
Apparently, the rabbit hole goes deeper. The wayback machine puts the "AI Generated" description on the cheese website at August 7th, 2020. The AI didn't hallucinate anything because it didn't generate anything, the entire premise is simply fake.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200807133049/https://www.wisco...
The (edited) cheese ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I18TD4GON8g
What probably should be the target link: https://www.theverge.com/news/608188/google-fake-gemini-ai-o...
by firecall on 2/9/25, 12:59 PM
“the Google executive Jerry Dischler said this was not a “hallucination” – where AI systems invent untrue information – but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes.”
So what you are saying is that Gemini is basically useless?
Good to know. Thanks for clarifying that Google!
by iambateman on 2/9/25, 2:35 PM
Google saying “multiple websites have the fact so Gemini ran with it” is extraordinarily rich.
If ever there was a company which should know that “multiple websites” is not a good benchmark for accuracy, it’s Google.
This feels like a good parable for Google’s search these days. I’ve seen more wrong information from them than anyone lately. I wonder if they can course correct before it’s too late.
by kiririn on 2/9/25, 1:07 PM
The source sentence on cheese.com was: "It is the most popular Dutch cheese in the world, accounting for 50 to 60% of the world's cheese consumption."
The glorified autocomplete failed to detect the nuance in this (admittedly poorly written) sentence that the 50-60% statistic was of the world's Dutch cheese consumption
by phinnaeus on 2/9/25, 12:53 PM
I know very little about cheese and such a stat seems just incredibly obviously untrue. I wonder how it made it past the dozens or more people who worked on the ad.
by rKarpinski on 2/9/25, 2:21 PM
> The local commercial, which advertises how people can use “AI for every business”, showcases Gemini’s abilities by depicting the tool helping a cheesemonger in Wisconsin to write a product description
By copy/pasting another Cheese monger's incorrect product description...
by simonw on 2/9/25, 1:06 PM
Top relevant search result is a Reddit thread from 11 years ago quoting a cheese.com article: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2h2euc/til_g...
Internet Archive confirms that page has had the blatantly wrong stat up since at least April 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20130423054113/https://www.chees...
> If truth be told, it is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption.
Clearly predates generative AI, so I think this is junk human-written SEO misinformation instead.
Here's that page today: https://www.cheese.com/smoked-gouda/ - still has that junk number but is now a whole lot longer and smells a bit generative-AI to me in the rest of the content.
by acc_297 on 2/9/25, 3:26 PM
I’m very far from an evangelist of the tech but I was under the impression they had gotten better at this sort of thing.
I question why a model which “knows” about cheddar / mozzarella cheese would make this blunder.
Was this supposed to be generated by one of those “show your work” reasoning models or is this just the regurgitation of one of the single short response parrot of old quora answer or reddit post ai chatbots?
by oncallthrow on 2/9/25, 1:38 PM
Gouda being 50-60% of global cheese consumption is obviously complete rubbish. I'm shocked no-one working on the ad noticed.
by passwordoops on 2/9/25, 1:15 PM
My company contracted one of these LLMs to give us a bespoke chatbot. Works great for translation, and that's what I've been using it for. I popped in the line "Table 1 (etc, etc)"
It perfectly translated the line, but doesn't it also give me a completely made up 2-column 10-row data table! I asked it why, and the response was along the lines of "I am designed to make your life easier, and I thought providing this table would reduce your workload"
by WhyNotHugo on 2/9/25, 2:10 PM
Sounds like Google's AI produced some stats that were quite obviously mistaken, but nobody cared to fact-check in the slightest before shipping.
> the Google executive Jerry Dischler said this was not a “hallucination” [...] but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes.
What's this guy is describing is pretty much the root cause of what we colloquially refer to as "hallucination".
by 31337Logic on 2/9/25, 4:14 PM
Google: "Gemini didn't make a mistake. It simply plagiarized a factually-incorrect article. Word for word."
Gee, thank you Google for convincing me you have a product that I find useful and that I can trust. I look forward to you trying to cram this down my throat, against my will, at every opportunity you see fit. :-/
by jgalt212 on 2/9/25, 1:37 PM
> Jerry Dischler said this was not a “hallucination” – where AI systems invent untrue information – but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes.
So LLMs like any other computer system suffer from "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
by neilv on 2/9/25, 4:07 PM
This is at least the second embarrassment with a high-profile Google AI ad/demo.
(I'm also thinking of when, in the LLM boat-missed frenzy, they faked an interactive AI demo, to make it look much more responsive than their actual tech was.)
I'm unclear on how either incident was allowed to happen.
by _blk on 2/9/25, 3:11 PM
none of the marketing geniuses thought: hey, that's odd, 50% of my cheese consumption is definitely not Gouda which probably accounts for every single one of them, Dutch people included.
by Workaccount2 on 2/9/25, 2:53 PM
It's bizarre to me how the media (and mainly tech media) has been bending over backwards to make this story a big deal.
A cheese fact on a cheese website was wrong therefore Gemini is bad? What?
by 486sx33 on 2/9/25, 1:35 PM
Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t make it true Google!
by idontwantthis on 2/9/25, 1:43 PM
“You don’t have any gouda?!” “‘Fraid not sir.” “But it accounts for 50-60% of total cheese consumption in the world!”
by rootnod3 on 2/9/25, 2:59 PM
This is just another point showcasing how useless LLMs are. They either hallucinate OR are polluted by "wrong" information on websites. If I need to double or triple check everything an LLM does, I'd rather just do it myself immediately.