Google AI Ad Features Wrong Song—Did Gemini Write This?

Google is batting below the Mendoza line for its AI commercials—this time at the expense of James Blunt. Last year’s Olympics AI written fan letter got pulled, will the same thing happen to this ‘Just Ask Google’ commercial?

Google is pushing its Google Gemini AI service hard, showcasing how the service can supposedly make every day tasks easier. This particular commercial focuses on a young man named Ted, who was born in 1998—the same year as the first Google search. One of Ted’s first searches as a teen was for a ‘James Blunt music video’ while the James Blunt song “You’re Beautiful” plays in the background.

As the commercial fast-forwards to Ted being 26, he’s using Google Gemini to search various aspects of his life, like fixing a broken grill or finding entertainment in town. Ted asks the AI to find him “something cool happening in the city that still gets him home at a reasonable time.” Google’s AI returns the result, a James Blunt Anniversary Tour concert playing in Chicago. The only problem?

The next scene shows Ted seemingly attending the concert Google found for him, with the Tal Bachman song “She’s So High” playing as the backing track. Whoops. I’m not sure how this got past Google’s quality control checks—because obviously the company had to license both James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” and Tal Bachman’s “She’s So High” to feature them in the commercial. At no point in the creative process did anyone stop to say hey, why are we featuring a song from someone entirely different? Wasn’t this commercial supposed to be about how Ted’s love for James Blunt helped him find love?

Most people who see the commercial are also confused, especially if they grew up in the era when the Tal Bachman song was popular (1999) enough to play on the radio day after day. “‘She’s So High’ isn’t a James Blunt song,” reads one comment. “If only we had the technology to fact check things like this…” Indeed.

James Blunt does have a similar song titled “High” that appeared on the same album as “You’re Beautiful”—in fact both were released as singles when the album Back to Bedlam dropped in 2004. So the entire time this ad was being story boarded at Google, no one thought to check that both songs featured in it were from the same artist featured prominently in the commercial. One can’t help but wonder how James Blunt feels about the mistake—one that seems reminiscent of the early days of Napster and its penchant for mislabeled songs.

A common misconception from that era was that Bob Seger sings the song “Drift Away” due to mislabeling and inaccurate metadata. He doesn’t. That song belongs to Dobie Gray. Yet here we are in 2025, with Google’s Gemini mucking it up worse than illegally downloaded tracks from the early days of the internet.