Crabnox: Overthinking It: Google Image Search vs. AI Image Generator

"Here's Johnny!"

For most people, that brief phrase conjures a sole image: Jack Nicholson's maniacal Jack Torrance furiously hacking through a door to reach his terror-stricken wife. A Google search of the utterance, with no further context, yields dozens of images of The Shining's most iconic scene before a single shot of the phrase's originator, Ed McMahon, ever appears. For decades, any reasonably intelligent person has been quickly able to find a photo of the unhinged, ax-wielding Torrance.

But until lately, unless one was a Photoshop ace, it was difficult to obtain images that address more hypothetical topics, images that answer questions such as: "How would Edie Sedgwick look if she were alive today?", "What would the love child of Scarlett Johansson and Bob Hope look like?", and "What if Angela Lansbury had played the lead role in the Rambo series?". Fortunately, recent developments in AI software have made short work of realistically rendering such subjects.

Convincing AI-generated images

Left: Princess Diana, were she alive today

Right: A-lister Will Smith as an ordinary fast food hireling

With this in mind, we decided to approach an AI image generator with a far simpler directive: just show us film and television classics featuring their original stars. If AI can spawn surprisingly lifelike visualizations of highly speculative subject matter, then it must certainly be able to churn out rigorously accurate reproductions of images that already exist. Our first prompt of "The Shining, Jack Nicholson, here’s Johnny" seemed like a no-artificial-brainer; even Jeeves would have been able to help.

But instead of simply regurgitating easily located stills of our requested subjects, the AI presented a string of bizarre, often disturbing images. Each contains identifiable elements of what we sought (some to a greater extent than others), but the overall compositions are surreal and unsettling. Certain motifs—diseased eyes, doppelgängers, grotesquely gnarled hands—recur several times, and occasionally the AI seemed to utilize random features from actors other than those we specified (for instance, the AI's purported Jack Nicholson displays a correctly configured left eyebrow but possesses a honker of Harrison Fordian angles and proportions). We have presented our findings below, each in a side-by-side comparison with the Google-sourced image that inspired our AI prompt.