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.
Regardless of how the image was generated, why is Google treating a random blogspam site as the authoritative version of a work of art over (say) Wikipedia?
According to the article:
Does that mean I can search for any famous image, take the largest existing version, upscale it by 1% and post it on my own site, and instantly be featured at the top of google searches?
Because Wikipedia doesn't serve ads or pay Google, so Google doesn't like to make them the top result for a lot of searches they should be.
So, yes you can get to the top of image searches that way, but you also have to add google ads to your page so that google can get a second hit of revenue it drives users to your page, serves the ad, and changes the advertiser.