Google Serves AI Slop as Top Result for One of the Most Famous Paintings in History

[highplainsdem]

https://www.404media.co/google-serves-ai-slop-as-top-result-for-one-of-the-most-famous-paintings-in-history/

The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.

Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of links they usually see in results. As first spotted by a user on Twitter, when people searched for “Hieronymus Bosch” on Google, it included a couple of images from the real painting, but the first and largest image they saw was an AI-generated version of it.

This is what Google showed:




Google removed that AI image from search results last night and sent this reply to the reporter:

"Search is designed to show helpful and high quality information – including representative imagery in knowledge panels – while giving people tools to help them make sense of what they find online," a Google spokesperson told me in an email. "Given the scale of the open web, however, it’s possible that our systems might not always select the best images regardless of how those images are produced, AI-generated or not. When we receive user feedback about potential issues, we work to make timely improvements."

Where the AI image came from:

Google was pulling the image from the personal website of Andrea Concas, who according to his Linkedin is an “Art Tech Entrepreneur” and the founder of an “NFT Magazine to be read and collected on Ethereum.” The AI-generated image was specifically being pulled by this AI-generated slop blog in Italian about Bosch, which reads like an LLM summation of the artist’s Wikipedia article. Concas’s site includes dozens of AI-generated articles, each with an AI-generated image. As the “Art News” section on his site clearly states at the top:

The advisory Andrea Concas posted says that AI can provide " inaccurate and imaginative" information. He says it's the reader's responsibility to verify if the information on his website is accurate. HIS purpose is "experimentation and research."

So, thanks to genAI, we have people happy to flood the internet with AI garbage, as long as it gets them attention and maybe earns them some money with minimal work, and it's everyone else's responsibility to sort through the ever-increasing mountain of garbage.

And don't expect Google to help you sort through the slop...though they apparently welcome users rescuing them ASAP from their most embarrassing failures.