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.
Meh. Art history - sure! Books, writing, films, music.
Paintings though are a bit more dodgy. Most of the ‘classical’ paintings (in the renaissance and baroque periods) were created through a system of patronage by monarchs, if not for a selfish ego-boost of endless royal portraiture, then as a strategic move to enhance the prestige of the monarchy to it’s neighbours.
Of course, music is often guilty of this too. Bach’s famous struggles with securing patronage for instance, but due to its more abstract nature, it is probably a better source of information about the author than a painting about the painter.
It will hardly inform you of what the people or the world was like at the time, but rather what the monarchs wanted to project, which of course is helpful too for understanding the political situation at the time, but it’s hardly an efficient way to acquire that information, nor do the ideas gained from such exploration likely to lead to concrete conclusions.
Kind of like judging a people by their government’s propaganda department commissions.
What is interesting though is the fact that AI art, and the LAION-5B dataset used to train the models is a true and earnest reflection of sorts of what images today really are, from works of art to private commissions for furries etc to plain stock photos and other corporate graphics.
It’s an interesting reality check to compare the kinds of images your mind conjures connected to an idea and the kinds of images stable diffusion produces instead, it’s revealing of one’s biases in a very unique way.