The Super Bowl is a gift that keeps on giving. While The Spin looks forward to the blitz of advertisements and the annual ‘superb owl’ spike in Google Trends, a few of us keep an eye out for the inevitable gift of gaffes.
This year, The Spin spotted a Google Super Bowl commercial for its Gemini AI tool, which included an inaccurate statistic about Gouda cheese – that it accounts “for 50 to 60 per cent of the world’s cheese consumption”. While Google recreated the ad to fix the fact, and reposted the corrected ad, it wasn’t fast enough to stop the social media storm around it.
Many content creators called it out as a hallucination, but Google’s President of Cloud Applications Jerry Dischler was quick to point out that it wasn’t a made-up stat – just a factually incorrect one commonly cited on the web. In Dischler’s words, “Gouda news: many love this cheese! Bada news: not everyone thinks it’s as grate.” The jury’s still out on whether AI ought to know better.
Speaking of inaccurate statistics and hallucinations, looks like humans are as culpable as AI (if not more). The Spin found a convoluted write-up following Indian utility giant Reliance Power’s earnings release for the October-December quarter of the 2024-25 financial year.
An article published by Times Now reported inaccurate net profit figures not once, but twice – comically enough – mixing up even the notations belonging to two different numbering systems in the process. Between the headline, sub-headline and the introductory paragraph, the net profit was reported as “Rs 419.5 crore”, “Rs 419.5 million” and “Rs 41.95 crore”. Go figure.
Another major topic of discussion in early 2025 has been the ubiquitous rollback of DEI across US governmental entities and the military, following US President Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
During Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, Republican lawmakers – and their retinues – were so focused on their agenda of taking DEI out of the military that they inadvertently, and quite literally, took the ‘I’ out of ‘MILITARY’.
An Associated Press photographer immortalised the blunder on the printed board behind Republican Senator Eric Schmitt and Republican Senator Ted Budd, which read, “DEI in our Miltary.”
The Spin also received a fun submission from the Indian city of Bengaluru, where the road signs in the local language of Kannada are spelt correctly in the local script, but unfortunately lack consistency when translated to English.
For those visiting the city and unfamiliar with the lay of the land, it makes a convincing argument that this could well be directions to two different places that sound similar – which The Spin has confirmed it’s not.
Also arriving in The Spin’s inbox this month, we’ve got a fire extinguisher that looks more like a flamethrower, models unwittingly wearing their watches upside down, and an AI-generated creative for eBay that has a hand that doesn’t fit well in an ad that claims the ‘perfect fit’.
