Obviously google was basically already unusable over the past five years but this is... this is something else. Any subject you want to look up will have the first three pages entirely comprised of procedurally generated fake blogs and websites. And there's nothing there. Just scraped text from articles mashed together with varying amounts of hallucinations on top. Not even selling a product, just to harvest ad revenue.
What's maybe even worse is the steady degradation of image searches too. Joe Everyman generates some slop, the image's metadata tags include a historical artist's name. Some one on pinterest pins it while trawling the web. Now there are fifty gooey generated sludge images when you look up the historical painter.
And its not just artists. Historical figures, animals too. Look up 'baby peacock' if you want a clear example of it.
It's a pretty funny bit google, I hope it keeps going.
that gets me a top result of this
seems to be a legit birdwatching site, they have an active facebook, and an instagram with bird pics and a few thousand followers
don't know much about peacocks, but their page on the yellow legged gull is accurate at least :vivian-shrug:
Yeah, that one's legit but there's also a bunch of midjourney ones that got passed around on social media as the real deal a few weeks back. They're even hosted as adobe stock images, imagine someone just finding that online and not bothering to check the 'ai generated' label.
fair
Vivian emote??? I love this website.
The GIS results for "baby peacock" are 50% the real thing and 50% stuff like this monstrosity.
The twitter comments on the latter one are full of people saying "yeah we know it's not real" but whose choice of phrasing reveals they thought it was.
In the article they specifically call out the ai generated image which keeps on popping up too, lol