AI Images in Google Search Results Have Opened a Portal to Hell

Google image search results are turning up AI-generated images of celebrities and leading users to sites that host AI-generated nudes celebrities made to look like children.

Google image search is serving users AI-generated images of celebrities in swimsuits and not indicating that the images are AI-generated. In a few instances, even when the search terms do not explicitly ask for it, Google image search is serving AI-generated images of celebrities in swimsuits, but the celebrities are made to look like underage children. If users click on these images, they are taken to AI image generation sites, and in a couple of cases the recommendation engines on these sites leads users to AI-generated nonconsensual nude images and AI-generated nude images of celebrities made to look like children.

The news is yet another example of how the tools people have used to navigate the internet for decades are overwhelmed by the flood of AI-generated content even when they are not asking for it and which almost exclusively use people’s work or likeness without consent. At times, the deluge of AI content makes it difficult for users to differentiate between what is real and what is AI-generated.

I discovered that Google image search was doing this completely by accident. Jason was reporting his story about how fan pages of Taylor Swift and other celebrities on Facebook have been taken over by images bestiality and scams and we were trying to check whether an image of Taylor Swift sticking her tongue out was AI-generated or edited. To find it, I typed the search term “taylor swift beach sunglasses tongue out,” which pulled up a couple of AI-generated images on the Google image search tab. One, pulled from a Japanese Pinterest page which included a number of other AI-generated images of Swift, looked fairly realistic. The other, pulled from an AI-image generation site called Neural Love, included a bunch of typical AI-generated deformities and was clearly fake.

Since both results were on the first page (the AI-generated image of Swift in the car is currently the third result), I wanted to check if Google image searching for celebrity names plus the term “swimsuit” or “bikini” would consistently turn up AI-generated images. Overall, I tested this method with 13 female celebrity names, including some of the most famous people on the planet and some lesser known YouTubers and Twitch Streamers, and every single Google Image search indexed AI-generated images of them even though the search term did not include “AI.”

A search for two celebrities also turned up AI-generated images of them in swimsuits, but as children, even though the search didn’t include terms related to age.

“Our automated systems aim to show the highest quality and most relevant images for the billions of queries we receive every day,” a Google spokesperson told me in an email. “Given the scale of the open web, there are cases when our ranking systems might surface relevant web content that unfortunately falls short of our quality standards. We use these instances to inform overall improvements, as we continue to prioritize efforts to prevent low-quality content – including low-quality AI-generated content – from surfacing highly in Search.”

The spokesperson said that Google Search indexes hundreds of billions of pages and images across the web, and while tools to reliably identify AI-generated images at this scale exist, they are in a nascent stage and are not infallible. The spokesperson indicated that Google could do a better job labeling AI images created with its own generator, as detailed in this company blog.

Google did not respond to specific questions about why it was surfacing AI-generated content in search results, and we can’t say for certain what is happening, but it’s easy to imagine why “automated systems” would surface these images. The images are always tagged with the celebrities’ names, and additional terms like “bikini,” “bathing suit,” or “swimsuit.” Because these images are coming from AI-image generation sites, they often also include the text prompts that created them, providing a kind of detailed annotation for what’s in the image. Finally, these AI-image generation sites are popular, and it’s easy to imagine people click on never-before-seen photographs of Taylor Swift in a bathing suit (because it’s not real), possibly driving it up higher in search results.

Clicking one of these images in Google image search results takes users to these AI-image generation sites, which presents them with dozens of similar AI-generated images. For example, when I clicked on one AI-generated image of a celebrity in a swimsuit made to look like a child, I was taken to Playground.com, an AI image generating site, which presented me with dozens more images of the same celebrity in child form, in a bathing suits, as well as dozens of other AI-generated images of children in bathing suits. A few of the images were titled “[name of celebrity] on Epstein Island in bikini,” referring to Little Saint James, a private island owned by Jeffery Epstein where he was accused of trafficking and sexually assaulting children.

Clicking on another AI-generated image of a celebrity made to look like a child in a swimsuit leads users to a site called sdxlturbo.ai. Under that image, are a number of other images of child celebrities in swimsuits, and a few AI-generated images of topless celebrities made to look like children. The prompts that generated one of these images is: “[name of celebrity] at 8 years old, very muscular abs, showing her belly, bathing.”

Given how the recommendation engine works on these AI image generation sites, clicking on one of these images sends users down a rabbit hole with more images of the same kind. The results are also another reminder that AI-generated CSAM isn’t produced and shared just on the dark web or other hard to access corners of the internet, but easily accessible on AI tools and platforms, despite these platforms’ policies, and are just a couple of clicks away from a Google search.

The AI-generated images of celebrities that appear in Google search results tend to come from a handful of AI image generation sites: Lexica, Neural Love, Prompt Hunt, Night Cafe, and also Deviantart, which doesn’t have an image generation tool but where people host AI-generated images. The content policies for these sites, in the instances I could find them, vary, but generally prohibit nonconsensual pornography and CSAM. That doesn’t mean the policies are enforced perfectly.

Playground, for example, which currently hosts several AI-generated images of celebrities as children in bathing suit on “Epstein island,” has a content policy that lists “content depicting children in a way that encourages or promotes attraction or sexualization of them” as “unacceptable use.”

“If you have any doubts about content in this category, you should refrain,” Playground’s content policy page says. "A perfect brightline does not exist so for anything in the gray area, we will moderate conservatively. As some guidance: young girl/boy/teen in their bikini/bra/underwear is problematic (it’s even worse if you negative prompt the clothing); anything ‘bulging’ is unlikely to pass muster; and prompting ‘eighteen’ does not necessarily make it acceptable.”

I could not find a content policy page sdxlturbo.ai, which currently hosts AI-generated images nude celebrities made to look like children, or Lexica, where a quick search turned up an AI-generated nonconsensual nude of a celebrity.  

Overall, I saw Google pull AI-generated image of celebrities from 11 different AI-image generation sites. Lexica and sdxlturbo.ai did not respond to a request for comment.

The Google spokesperson said that in addition to its legal obligations, Google has product policies that dictate when it will remove content from search results. Google says it blocks search results that lead to child sexual abuse imagery or material that appears to victimize, endanger, or otherwise exploit children. The Google spokesperson said that the company isn’t able to comment on any actions taken against specific sites, but I have not noticed any of the sites mentioned in this story being blocked from search results after I flagged them to Google.

404 Media has spent the last year reporting on the way AI, and specifically AI-generated images, have flooded the internet. Jason has written multiple articles on how AI-generated slop has zombified Facebook, and I have focused on a few image generation sites like Mage.Space, Tensor.Art (which also shows up in Google image search results), and most importantly Civitai, which is a crucial resource for the AI image generation scene because it also hosts custom image generation models. However, these are just a fraction of a rapidly growing industry of AI-image generation sites that are flooding and overwhelming the internet. We’ve seen how these AI-generated image have completely changed Facebook, and because adult content is often a good early indicator for where the internet is going, it’s easy to imagine how AI-generated images can change Google image search as we know it as well.

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