Do you know what a pink fairy armadillo looks like? It’s a small mammal with whitish fur, big scaly claws, and a squirrel-like face from which a flat cloak of armoured scutes extends all the way to its hindquarters.

Like this (credit):

A pink fairy armadillo as described in the paragraph above

A real pink fairy armadillo

However, search for a picture of one, and you’ll see mostly the real thing, intermixed with a number of results that claim to be a pink fairy armadillo, but which are instead the imaginings of a generative AI that has hallucinated anatomical details and overestimated the amount of armour that covers its body:

The results of a Google image search for 'pink fairy armadillo'. Of twelve imaged, most are the real thing, but two are AI-generated images that have covered the creature in armour.

What Google image search shows you

Some of the sites that feed into those results are far worse. Adobe Stock’s results consist almost entirely of fantastical model-generated interpretations of the words “pink”, “fairy”, and “armadillo”. One of them even has wings!

A selection of fantastical interpretations of 'pink fairy armadillo' (plus one reasonable line-art cartoon). One of them has three pairs of hymenopterous wings.

Adobe Stock results

But these are still early days, just a couple of years into the hype bubble. AI-generated images are still recognisable from their uncanny glossiness, and it’s easy to pick out the preposterous results in a visible search, if they’re a minority, and if you know what reality looks like. But it’s more difficult in text, and as reality is diluted in a sea of slop, it will become harder and harder. It’s always been possible to put fake information on the internet, but generative AI facilitates its production on a massive scale, orders of magnitude larger than people can produce. We don’t stand a chance.

What will it be like when these results are fed back into the models; when a few more cycles of digital kuru have taken place; when we have full Habsburg AI? When every picture of a pink fairy armadillo is some kind of winged pastel dinosaur, and climate change, accelerated in part by the insatiable computational demands of AI models, has rendered the real thing extinct, will anyone even know what they were?

The etymology of the word penguin is unknown. It might be from Welsh, or possibly Latin. What we do know is that it originally referred to a bird of the northern hemisphere, the great auk, a flightless bird that looked a lot like its antarctic namesake. They’re all dead now, killed for fishing bait and feather bedding.

We turned our planet into an uninhabitable desert and all we got was this lousy epistemological collapse.