Last week, Google released a Super Bowl ad that showed off its AI model, Gemini, generating product descriptions for a local Wisconsin cheese mart. The ad quickly drew online scrutiny, as Gemini had seemingly generated an erroneous fact about the purported worldwide fervor for gouda; it said that gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent” of all global cheese consumption, and as an expert told The Verge, that simply isn’t true. Google executives defended the accuracy of the statistic at first, before quietly editing YouTube version of the ad to correct the error (and seemingly running afoul of Google-owned YouTube’s policies in the process.) But as it turns out? Gemini appears not to have even generated the product description at all. Or, if it did cook up the test, it did so by fully plagiarizing the cheese mart’s existing web copy, which was published years before Gemini was even released or AI was even making much of a splash. As the Verge first reported, though the Google ad is crafted in a way that seemingly shows Gemini generating entirely new web copy for the business to use, archived versions of the cheese mart’s website show that the Wisconsin business has been using the exact same product description since at least 2020. Here’s the archived webpage: And here’s the original text that appeared in the Super Bowl ad, as nabbed by travel blogger Nate Hake. OpenAI’s ChatGPT wasn’t released until November 2022, and the earliest consumer-facing iteration of Google’s Gemini, the text-generating chatbot it…Google’s Super Bowl Ad Accidentally Shows Its AI Simply Plagiarizing Existing Web Copy