Try searching for the great German composer Ludwig Beethoven and see what pops up.

Did you get an AI-generated image?

The creation looks akin to Beethoven, but it’s clearly been scraped from his iconic portrait, and is now the first thing Googlers see when they look him up. The portrait on the right-hand corner of the screenshot below is what most people who are familiar with Beethoven imagine when they think of the influential pianist and composer. The intense eyes, which seem to be only briefly interrupted from the rapture of composition, give us a glimpse of the musical genius and passion of the man himself. Can you guess which portrait is AI generated?

The internet is now awash with such images, and it’s becoming harder to parse AI material from the “real thing.” Or, well, maybe it isn’t so hard. Although the AI imagery is getting better all the time, with Elon Musk’s Grok serving as the latest example, it still has…that wrongness about it somehow. The AI “portrait” of Beethoven lacks the subtle expression of its human-painted origins. Whereas the original painting offers a nuanced revelation of the person, the AI image looks like a malcontented version of Mel Gibson. It doesn’t invite us to the think of the subject as a person at all. It’s a simulation, a fake, a joke.

Cultural critic Ted Gioia posted his own two cents about the image on Substack:

That’s the odd thing about this issue. You can find the accurate portraits of Beethoven. There is no shortage of them. Is it because of AI hype that Google thinks it needs to promote faked images to the top of their search results? Google and other AI enthusiasts still need to ask themselves a very simple question: Why do we need this?