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.
You cannot comprehend the RAGE that rushed through me as I saw that the first google result for googling Hieronymus Bosch is incestuous AI sloop.
— ItsTheTalia (@ItsTheTalia) September 14, 2024
What are we even doing here...? pic.twitter.com/yHP5by93NY
I was able to confirm that Google Search was serving this AI-generated image to users yesterday, but Google removed it from search results at some point last night.
"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."
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:
Artificial intelligence can produce inaccurate and imaginative information about people, places or facts.
As a reader, you are responsible for critically evaluating the information presented in this article and verifying its accuracy also through additional sources.
The purpose of these articles is experimentation and research.”
The article and page on his website that the AI-generated image was pulled from does not include this disclaimer.
As 404 Media has reported in January, Google is regularly surfacing AI-generated websites that game search engine optimization before the human-made websites they are trained on. “Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced,” Google told 404 Media in a statement at the time. In June, I reported that it is incredibly easy and cheap to make a fully automated, AI-powered website.
Painted between 1490 to 1510, the real version of The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych with panels depicting scenes from the Garden of Eden, hell, and The Garden of Earthly Delights after which the piece is named. The way its three panels tell a story, a busy composition packed with symbolism, and dozens of figures engaged in bizarre and grotesque activities (especially the hell panel, where, for example, this guy has a flute in his ass) have captured imaginations for centuries, and have inspired everything from video games to music videos.
The AI-generated version of the painting that Google put in front of users has none of that substance. Like most AI-generated content, the image is good at reproducing the general style of the painting, with similar color, composition, and vaguely surreal biblical figures, but these figures are not really doing anything and are not arranged with purpose, draining the original painting of the symbolism and meaning that made it part of the canon of art history.
The search result for “Hieronymus Bosch” is by now just another example of a well-established problem on the internet and for Google Search specifically. As AI tools become more common and easy to access, the internet is being flooded with AI-generated content that Google’s automated systems are processing and then presenting to millions of users as if it was real. Almost exactly a year ago, I reported that the first Google Search result for Tiananmen Square’s “tank man” was an AI-generated selfie pulled from a random Reddit post.
Update: This article has been updated with comment from Google.
