“if truth be told”: cheese, AI and internet economics

so today on the internet there’s a lot of hay being made out of another in a long line of AI faux pas by Google, where Google demonstrates the power of artificial intelligence to automatically generate factually incorrect marketing copy on your electronic cheesemonger storefront. sorry for linking the New York Post as the source for this, but there’s a good reason, which I’ll address after this screenshot of the ad:

the New York Post is the first web site other than Twitter¹ which I could find a picture of the original version of the ad on. no more-reputable source posts a screen capture of Google advertising its tools’ ability to spew disinformation, instead opting to display, if anything, Google’s hastily-prepared, disinformation-free, replacement — presumably either out of a high-minded desire not to spew disinformation, or a more practical desire not to be hit with a bat by Google in search result ranking for spewing disinformation, even if Google originally planned to spend $8 million to advertise that it could spew the disinformation for you on national TV.

Google’s defense for Gemini here is that technically the AI isn’t hallucinating, in the sense of making up facts that didn’t appear in its corpus; it is repeating facts which are on the internet in several other places.

and, arguably, that’s kind of fair.

if you Google “gouda 50 to 60 percent”, you get a link to this wine market and bistro in Monterey, CA which published it in October 2016; this imported food shop in New York City; this grocery store on Long Island; this grocery store in Urbana, IL; this online food magazine that appears to have published two issues in 2020 and 2021 before folding²; and so on, all using identical, ironic-in-retrospect phrasing:

If truth be told, Gouda is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption.

you also get a link to this Reddit thread from over a decade ago which cites the factoid, originally from cheese dot com (sorry if you heard a frantic clicking noise, that was me changing my homepage) — and people in the comment thread call bullshit on it immediately because it’s obviously false. this factoid appeared, in the same words, on cheese dot com at the time; it appears to have been introduced in late 2012 after the design of cheese dot com was punched up to be more appealing to a more sophisticated Web audience, replacing the previous phrasing which does, indeed, seem to be factually correct, per Statista³:

Named after the Dutch town of Gouda, just outside Rotterdam. It accounts for more than 60% of the cheese produced in Holland and it has a very long history.

the rings of internet business models are visible here:

• cheese dot com, which got flipped from a domain squatter to WorldNews Network, Inc., which has been operating it continuously as a cheese-oriented Web portal since before the dot-com boom, but seems to have recently pivoted to be a gift box service first and foremost;
• local retail stores attempting to pivot to internet sales, and immediately being confronted with the challenge of selling physical products to people through a textual medium, deciding to either hand it off to a stock database at their storefront provider or a guy they paid $5 on Upwork, who in turn decided that they would do $5 of work, copying the first catchy-sounding sentence about Gouda they could find;
• spammy SEO blogs stood up hastily in an attempt to drive eyeballs (and ad sales) to an online micropublication run by a couple designers in Rockville, MD trying to fill in time between client work (and then abandoned, in favor of their photography magazine, which has an equally spammy SEO blog but seems to have caught on better);
• and, finally, the mass of barely-written crap eventually collapsing under its own weight and rendering the traditional way of operating a search engine untenable, forcing Google to develop first “instant answers”, and then LLM-digested Web text, which both function to seamlessly elevate “thirty people copying the same sentence from cheese dot com in the mid 2010s” to “indisputable fact with the logo of a trillion-dollar company on it”.
  
  (sorry, I didn’t say “indisputable fact”, there’s that little gray text at the bottom of the Gemini UI that says that whatever it produces isn’t factual. uh… “a creative writing aid”, I guess.)

maybe the problem isn’t with a particular technology; maybe it’s with the set of incentives we’ve created for publishing online. Google founded itself on trying to create a dividend to Web publishers for publishing information that was cited as an authority. information on the Web is increasingly operationalized purely as a way to get people through the door on your way to sell them something else — cheese, cheese accessories, a business card design commission, turnkey online storefronts to allow people worried about the decline in sales at their brick and mortar cheese shops to hedge against it with minimal investment, cloud compute marked up for retail to sell on to online cheesemongers who desperately need 250 words about Gouda in the next 45 seconds — so nobody cares about what they’re publishing any more beyond whether it pulls in eyes, and every well-researched piece of information is drowned out by a hundred copies of the same sentence stolen from a Web site that shows up at the top of the Google SERP because it’s been owned by the same people for 25 years.

why, then, is it so surprising that this is the Web we’ve ended up with? picture unrelated.

1. Twitter prevents you from viewing replies to a post while logged out, and I’m never logging into my Twitter account again. ↩︎
2. the fact that this magazine published through issuu — a service that, to me, is most famous for a period of time on twitter where if you published anything that did numbers, someone would come back to it a couple weeks later to mention that your tweet had been incorporated in their issuu magazine — gives me a pretty good idea of the publishers’ level of devotion to writing about food, which is to say: not much. ↩︎
3. which doesn’t seem to let you see who they scraped this fact from unless you pay them for doing the important work of giving you a link to what is probably a publicly-accessible PDF produced by a Dutch cheese manufacturers’ board.
   
   so that’s cool. the wheel continues to turn, endlessly. ↩︎