During the summer of 2023 something happened to ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. At least on Google. If someone searched for that image in that search engine, they would get an image that was generated by AI as a featured result. The error, notorious and notable, seems to have been corrected.
But there is at least another perhaps more worrying. It was discovered by the moderator of the r/mycology subreddit, who detected that when searching for a species of mushroom – specifically, the ‘coprinus comatus’, in Spain also known as “bearded” or “ink mushroom” – it appeared first. term not the actual photo of this mushroom, but an image generated by AI. And one that didn’t have much to do with it, actually.
At WorldOfSoftware we have just done the test and indeed the featured image is an image generated by AI in the search results. The moderator, under the alias MycoMutant, detected that the image had not even been generated by Google: the search engine had simply displayed it by harvesting the image from Freepik, where the image is clearly identified as generated by AI.
MycoMutant indicated in 404Media how he had been seeing for some time how the same thing had happened in certain species of mushrooms. He helps other users identify mushrooms correctly and thus avoid dangerous information about which species can be consumed and which cannot.
The problem, as this user commented, is that when Google uses those incorrect images in searches, the “reputation” of those images goes up: other bots can “trust” Google and end up spreading those images with information that can be dangerous.
He further stated that: “On more than one occasion I have seen people try to use bots to collect data from a database of mushroom species and the results have been horribly inaccurate and potentially full of dangerously misinformation.”
Other experts indicated in that article how images generated by AI, although they may come close to the real thing, can end up having terrible consequences. For Elan Trybuuch, secretary of the New York Mycological Society, Google should not only mark these images as generated by AI: it should delete them completely.
This is a new example of how these types of errors in texts and images – and in the future, videos – generated by AI can have harmful consequences for users. The speed with which the internet is filling up with content generated by AI does not make it easy to face this problem.
It is true, of course, that at least in the case of text chatbots things are improving, both because of the most recent versions, which make fewer errors, and because of the models that are capable of “reasoning” like o1 or the recent Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which also check your answers before presenting them to the user.
Image | Wikipedia | Google
