The Top Image of William Shakespeare on Google is Lazy AI Slop

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."

Will.I.Am Shakespeare

It's no secret that Google has been slammed with a tidal wave of AI-generated slop.

The wide proliferation of easy-to-use large language models and image generators has polluted the company's search results, watering down its value as the de facto librarian of the internet.

Even just Googling the name "William Shakespeare," often regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, prioritizes a blatantly AI-generated image of the iconic playwright.

It doesn't take much to identify the prominently featured portrait as the output of an image generator — as far as we can tell, the English writer had five, not six fingers on his left hand.

Besides, why not highlight the plentiful 17th-century renditions of the playwright's likeness instead? It's not like there aren't any portraits of the man Google's search results could surface to the top instead.

Slop Pick

The image links back to an uninspiring and mostly redundant biography of Shakespeare's life on Medium, text befit of a header image as lazy as this one.

The author, C.L. Nichols, has published dozens of articles on Medium, most of which feature equally lazy AI-generated images, including portraits of Fyodr Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens.

As Wired reported last month, Medium is drowning in a major influx of AI slop itself. AI detection startups Pangram Labs and Originality AI both found that the blogging platform has been overrun with AI-generated copy.

Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine told Wired that "AI-generated content that gets posted to Medium is probably up tenfold from the beginning of the year," but claimed that "we're strongly against AI content."

However, combating the issue is far harder said than done, with large language models becoming incredibly adept at generating text that remains undetected.

Even as the world's leading search engine, Google hasn't fared much better.

We've already come across Google prioritizing AI-generated dupes of the works of famous artists including Johannes Vermeer and Edward Hopper.

How exactly AI-generated images like Shakespeare's cartoonized likeness are floating to the top of Google's search results is hard to say. The company has historically kept the way its algorithms work tightly under wraps.

It's nonetheless yet another sign that the search giant is actively losing the war against AI-generated slop.

Worse yet, the company is itself making the situation worsel; Google recently rolled out "AI Overview" that's been caught stealing human-written content and more generally being shockingly bad at giving out accurate information.

More on AI slop: Sleazy Company Buys Beloved Blog, Starts Publishing AI-Generated Slop Under the Names of Real Writers Who No Longer Work There