Are you an aspiring art lover who wants to learn a bit about Cubism? Or an artist looking for visual references for Cubist painting? Well, maybe don’t start your research process into the 20th-century’s most famous art movement on Google. Or Bing. Or Duck Duck Go.
On every one of these search engines right now, the leading image result for “Cubism” is a janky A.I.-generated picture surfaced from a website called CubismArtwork.com. A variety of the other top results from the same site come up close behind. It’s been this way long enough that one X user pointed it out back in September.
In addition to offering garbled A.I.-written info on Picasso, Braque, Léger, Gris, and lesser-known Cubists, CubismArtwork.com hawks posters with colorful A.I.-generated graphics that look sort of like vintage exhibition posters but with nonsensical titles like “POP CUBISM ICON: Multiple Perspectives, One Single Shine” and “CUBISM AND RENAISSANCE: The Melding of Times and Tides.”
An image of an A.I.-generated Cubist-themed poster from CubismArtwork.com.
The site also offers educational subsections that are an inscrutable A.I.-written hybrid of art history and how-to-paint guide. A sample of the latter, from the site’s “Cubism Paintings of a Giraffe” section:
In the hallowed halls of artistic pursuit, where the ink of yesteryears has scarcely dried, Cubism stands as a formidable chapter. This paradigm-shattering movement, begotten through the virtuosity of Georges Braque, unveils new facets of reality by cracking open the vault of visual convention. It is in this arena of groundbreaking discovery that we shall endeavor to immortalize the quintessentially lofty being—a giraffe—into the annals of Cubist legacy.
I wrote to an email address listed on CubismArtwork.com to find out more about it. In short order, someone called Edwin who said he was its creator wrote me back. While declining to reveal where he was based or what tools he used to create the images, Edwin explained:
The website was designed with two main purposes: to offer free downloadable images, allowing users to explore and use these creations on various print-on-demand platforms, and to provide an e-commerce section for the sale of exclusive works.
Once the project was ready, I worked with a colleague to seek potential investors who could help us expand the concept. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure the necessary support, so the project is currently on hold, awaiting the right opportunity to move forward.
It seems that the impressive feat of dominating the search results for “Cubism” with A.I. might not be enough to float any kind of business! No one really wins here.
An image from a section of CubismArtwork.com labeled “Photographs that showcase how artificial intelligence algorithms can bring cubist aesthetics to life in contemporary fashion”
These “Cubist” artworks are bad, but CubismArtwork.com is quite up front that they are A.I.-made. Their prominence is a testament to how completely overwhelmed Google and smaller search engines are by the ever-growing volume of A.I. junk flooding the web. And if the search engines can’t tell the difference, it’s hard to imagine the A.I. tools themselves not training on these images in the future, creating a more and more garbled archive.
Maybe the effect is small. But as Ed Zitron writes, it’s like microplastics diffusing into the bloodstream of the info environment—tiny little irritants getting lodged in hidden corners, constantly, as people pick these images up to illustrate what “Cubism” looks like: in an Instagram graphic touting Picasso as a role model for Dyslexia Awareness Week; in a post by a small California arts center offering classes to inspire kids about modern art; in social media content by would-be creativity gurus; on other spam art-history websites…