The Curious Case of Quentell

I hang out on Mastodon quite a bit. ¹ One of the most consistently engaging people in the Mastodon fediverse is @futurebird@sauropods.win. Besides pro-ant propaganda, you get thoughts about teaching and mathematics, micro-science fiction, her cat Pica (often wronged, always right), and much more. Highly recommended.

She tooted:

The scientific illustrator, Quentell came to the US after WWII ...

Who is Quentell, I wondered?

Let's first look at some Quentell illustrations. They're roll-down wall charts on natural history, designed for schools. They're gorgeous:

Learning More About Quentell

Scientific illustrators are cool. Let's look into the life of this illustrator. The first link on both duckduckgo as well as google went to a particular page. This was a site I identified as some kind of webshop selling Quentell posters. They're beautiful, so it's not a surprise that there's now a market selling these as home decorations. It has Quentell's biography, which I will quote here: ^{2 3}

After graduating, Quentell worked as an illustrator for various German publishing houses, in particular for children's books. He also taught typography and graphic design at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Art School. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, Quentell was dismissed from his teaching post because of his liberal political views. He decided to leave Germany and settled in Zurich, Switzerland, where he continued to work as an illustrator. During the Second World War, Quentell worked for the US Army as a designer of military training materials. He created illustrations for manuals and posters that were used to train American soldiers. After the war, Quentell returned to Germany and worked as a graphic designer for various companies. He is best known for his anatomical illustrations for physical education and biology textbooks, which were widely used in schools in Germany and other countries. Quentell died on February 10, 1993 in Baden-Baden, Germany. His work had a significant influence on the illustration of educational textbooks for children, as well as on graphic design in general.

Ah, interesting. While it says Quentell worked for the US army, I didn't conclude he went to the US, as the toot said. So I identified this as a separate, somewhat conflicting source about Quentell.

At the time, I had no idea that this biography is completely, utterly wrong. Join me on my journey of how I found out, and what I think happened.

Alert. Alert. Wikipedia Has Nothing

Curious about the discrepancy in biography, I figured I'd look up this Quentell person in Wikipedia.

But there was nothing in the English Wikipedia whatsoever. I checked the German Wikipedia. Nothing either. There were Quentells of centuries past; the closest was Gustav Quentell (1816-1896) who was a painter of portraits and paintings of animals, most famously horses. Not our 20th century Quentell.

A missing Wikipedia page about an artist whose art is all over the place, and who had a biography like that? He was dismissed by the Nazis!

I realized how much I rely on Wikipedia to find good information, including sources. But that Wikipedia entry was missing. That there was nothing in Wikipedia was very surprising to me. I didn't yet realize I should've been alarmed.

For now I saw it as an opportunity to create a new Wikipedia page. It's not often these days you get to do that. So let's find out more about this Quentell; some good sources.

Dr Friedrich Quentell

I learned about the existence of a Dr Friedrich Quentell. I could find websites sell "Dr Friedrich Quentell Furniture", as if Quentell was a furniture designer. (He's not. It's the wall charts)

Is this our own Quentell? Other sources had him as a scientific illustrator, but my impression was that he was active too early to fit our biography.

The Quest of the Historical Quentell

Thankfully, I found traces of what I thought was the real Quentell. For instance in the duckduckgo search overview I could find this snippet on another seller website:

Jung-Koch Quentell (1902-1993) was a German graphic designer known for his illustrations for children's books and educational manuals. He was born in Berlin on October 22, 1902, and studied at the Berlin School of Fine Arts from 1920 to 1924.

I also could find versions of this biography in various languages on other sites in the google search result snippets. Here's an example:

Hij is vooral bekend om zijn anatomische illustraties voor leerboeken over lichamelijke opvoeding en biologie, die veel gebruikt werden op scholen in Duitsland

I was slightly surprised to find that these wall charts were by a illustrator who lived comparatively recently. I just had the vague impression that these went back further, but I don't know much about art or design, so didn't worry much about it.

Jung-Koch seemed like a curious given name for a German, but I dismissed that too. I had his full name, and dates of birth! I found information along these lines on several different seller websites, through search result overviews.

I also ran into sellers attributing works to Quentell to the 50s, and the 70s, so this matched biography. Evidently he was still producing new posters at this time.

But stores selling design objects aren't a good source for Wikipedia, so I didn't really dig into them. I wanted a real source, for the Wikipedia page I was going to help create. So I kept searching.

Instead of "Jung-Koch Quentell" I also found sellers that spelled his name as "Jung Koch Quentell", without hyphens, and multiple sellers used "Jung Kock Quentell", a hilarious typo. I thought it was more evidence this person exists, but that sellers were a bit cavalier with their facts.

Jung-Koch-Quentell

I also found "Jung-Koch-Quentell". Curious hyphenation...

Wait a second. Maybe this isn't the name of an individual. "Jung-Koch" was already an odd first name for a German. Then I found this on another seller's website:

Heinrich Jung, Dr. G. Tön Koch, Dr. F. Quentell.

Wait a minute. These are three last names, and three people.

If I'd have looked at some of these illustrations better, I'd have seen the hyphenation:

Who are these three, then? This is F. Quentell - I ran into him earlier but he seemed to be from a different era; I couldn't find out much about him in general. Maybe that was wrong? Perhaps this biography is about Friedrich Quentell after all?

I did some more digging and found this on Amazon:

This illustration was created by painter Professor Gottlieb von Koch together with biologist Dr. Friedrich Quentell and the teacher Heinrich Jung. Up until the 1930s, Jung/Koch/Quentell charts were published by Frommann & Morian. After the war Hagemann, a publishing house of educational media, bought the rights for Jung/ Koch/Quentell charts and started to publish them in the late 1950s, early 1960s.

So according to this, there's a painter/professor von Koch (not Tön Koch, like the previous website has; an OCR issue?), a biologist Quentell, and a teacher Heinrich Jung. And these charts were produced before the 1930s already.

Other sources have Quentell as "college director", "school director" or just "director", von Koch as the biologist and Jung still as teacher.

A blog entry from 2013 (again by a seller) has more information:

The name Jung Koch Quentell came to be as they were the last names of the three men, all scientists, who in the Fifties designed the charts for the German Publishing Company Hagemann, which supplied learning aids to German Schools.

Unfortunately this source, while closer to the truth, is still casual with it, as these designs were not created in the 1950s for the publisher Hagemann, but half a century earlier for Fromann & Morian. The later dates are because Hagemann republished these during that period.

Museums

So far we've only dug up information from sellers. This not a surprise - sellers have an interest in being high in the search indexes as they want to sell stuff. They're less interested in facts.

Museums are different. Museums are great. Museums like facts. I found this page by global.museum-digital.org. The relevant information is in German so will translate it here:

Already in the 1890s Frommann & Morian in Darmstadt published the series "Wall charts for natural history education", illustrated by Prof. Dr. Gottlieb von Koch (1849-1914), and edited by the teacher Heinrich Jung (birth & death dates unknown), and seminar director Dr. Friedrich Quentell (birth & death dates unknown).

A "seminar director" seems to mean something like "department chair", or "director of an institute".

Another museum had more information about Gottlieb von Koch. Here is the translation from German:

From 1870 studied zoology in Heidelberg and Jena. 1872 promotion under August Haeckel. In 1875 he was appointed as director of the Grand Ducal Natural History Cabinet in Darmstadt. In 1877 he became professor at the Technical University Darmstadt. He became well known through publications as well as zoological wall charts.

Haeckel

Haeckel. That name rang a bell. He studied under August Haeckel, better known as Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel promoted Darwin's work in Germany, and is known for promoting a now outdated theory of evolution ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" - the idea that the development of the embryo of an animal displays stages similar to its evolution). Haeckel is also known for lovely illustrations of biology:

In the past few years the Radboud university hospital in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has had a gorgeous exhibition of Haeckel's work in one of its hallways. I walked past it quite a few times. They were presented as wall charts.

A Curious Parallel

So F. Quentell collaborated on the wall charts in question. Going by the life of Koch, and that these were already being produced the 1890s, he cannot have been born in 1902 and he must have died before 1993, which are the details in our biographical data.

In my searches I found this curious parallel biography of a Swiss designer named Eidenbenz:

• Born 1902, died in 1993

• Taught at an art school in in Magdeburg (not Berlin) from 1926 for 6 years, so until about 1932 (not 1933)

• Taught typography and graphic design

• Returned to Switzerland to Basel (not Zurich)

• Returned to Germany after the war

• Died February 25 (not 20) in Basel (not Baden-Baden)

Curious parallels. Is this a coincidence?

What is this Quentell biography?

All Roads Lead to Rome

So the Quentell biography appears to be entirely bogus. But didn't I have multiple sources backing up this biography, in multiple languages? This helped convince me this person existed, while at the same time not following up on these references because they were obviously sellers. But even if these are not good sources, they still appeared to be alternative sources of this biographical information. ⁴

The main bio was on the first search hit when we look for "Quentell illustrator", and I found out that indeed the name is listed as "Jung-Koch Quentell" in their system. Let's call this site X.

So I decided to look more closely. So I follow a link to a seller website with some biographical information, with a decidedly different domain as site X. Hm, I get redirected to site X. I click on another link. Redirects to site X too. A third? Site X again.

Either Site X bought a few independent sellers, but I think it's more plausible that these sellers never existed: site X just created dummy websites to appear higher on the search index results: SEO.

When was this information created? I tried the the Wayback Machine on our original bio link, but no luck: it's not archived. I can't find information from before 2022 on the internet with this biography in it, but I can't absolutely exclude its existence either.

Site X already existed by 2020, but the site at the time is in Dutch ⁵. By early 2022 the site had undergone a redesign to English.

But what about the amazing @futurebird on Mastodon? Didn't she have independent, slightly different biographical information? I ask her. She says she recalls she read Quentell worked for the US army. From this she must have drawn the conclusion he migrated to the US. Bingo - she used the same source: site X.

What have we learned?

Let's review what we have learned so far:

• Jung-Koch Quentell is a common mistake, turning three names into one, last name "Quentell". This is not the name of a real person.

• It's not easy to find public information on the internet about Jung, Koch and Quentell. While their illustrations are all over the place, only bare data is available, especially in English. About Quentell specifically almost nothing is known.

• There is a designer, Eidenbenz, with a curiously parallel life to the bio of Quentell.

• Sellers appear rather cavalier about the facts.

• The weird biographical information can be traced back to site X.

• I cannot trace this information back to before 2022.

The Hypothesis

Large Language Models (LLMs) first came to the public attention in 2022 when ChatGPT was released.

The way an LLM works is by producing plausible continuation text based on some input text (a prompt); other training influences generation but this is at the core of it. The plausible text it generates may be true (true things tend to be plausible, after all), but it can also be complete bullshit: speech intended to pursuade without regard for the truth. When there's not much to go on in its training data, an LLM tends to produce bullshit. This problem of "hallucination" (I think a more accurate term is confabulation) is well known, and it's inherent to the statistical nature of these systems.

So here is what I think happened. Someone at site X was tasked to create a lot of biographies of designers; the site has a lot of designers. And they used an LLM, like ChatGPT, to do so.

They also used an LLM to create the bios on the various other funnel sites they maintain for SEO purposes, thus adding more, different bad information to be indexed. These SEO sites indicate that this may not be an intern who just did this, but that more deliberate strategy was involved.

The LLM generated a bio combining information it already had on other designers. The biographical information of Eidenbenz may have influenced the statistical generation. Why such a strong parallel exists I don't know; perhaps it's due to the specifics of the prompt given to the LLM that we cannot uncover.

I can't prove it, but I think it's a plausible scenario.

More Bogus Bios

Let's try to find more evidence for my hypothesis!

I examined site X to see whether other bogus biographies could be found. Many of the biographies I found look to be correct in the rough outlines, as far as I can verify them. One irony is that the harder it is for me to verify the outlines (because there is less information online), the more likely an LLM is involved.

I did find a few more suspicious cases.

Here's the entry for "Lyngfeldt Larsen":

During their career, the Lyngfeldt Larsens worked on a wide range of design projects, including furniture, textiles, lamps and decorative objects.

I can't find much about Lyngfeldt Larsen, but a Danish furniture designer named Kai Lyngfeldt Larsen appears to exist. The bio text seems to imply it's some kind of husband and wife team. This is what I find elsewhere:

A low, Danish lounge chair by husband-and-wife design team Tove and Edvard Kindt-Larsen for France.

I think these Kindt-Larsens are completely different from Lyngfeldt Larsen, but you could see how an LLM (or even a human) could get confused with information close to each other in latent space.

Here's another entry, for Rudolf Wolf:

He is best known for his work in interior design and furniture, where he was influenced by the avant-garde movements of the time, such as Bauhaus and De Stijl. Wolf was also involved in building design, including the interior design of Munich's National Theater. Over the years, Rudolf WOLF became a highly respected designer in Germany, where he was honored for his work with the title of Professor. Today, his work is considered an important contribution to the history of modern design.

Now Rudolf Wolf is apparently a Dutch designer, not German as the name might suggest. The Bauhaus period had its heyday before he was 14 years old. I can't find evidence of him doing the interior design of Munich's National Theatre, but there was another Rudolf Wolf who was a typeface designer who died in Munich in 1940, and a Rudolf Wolf who was a Munich painter. Nor can I find evidence the Dutch furniture designer Rudolf Wolf became a professor in Germany. But there was a Swiss astronomy professor Rudolf Wolf, who did work on sunspots. ⁶. I suspect the AI got confused by the various Rudolf Wolfs.

I invite anyone who knows more about obscure designers than I do to do some sampling on site X ⁷ and report on it.

Information Pollution

I have mixed feelings about generative AI. I am not as negative as many critics I see. I have had positive experiences using it for a few years now in computer programming. I think there's a lot of untapped entertainment potential.

And just the fact that we have machines that can use natural language - the first besides humans on this planet - is actually very impressive to me. Generative AI should lead to interesting philosophical discussions about the nature of intelligence, something unfortunately often lacking in both the pro and anti AI discussions I see online. I lean towards humility about our how special we are as humans, as over and over again in the history of science this perspective turned out to be the right one.

But that doesn't mean I'm not critical. One of the aspects of generative AI I worry about the most is an increase in information pollution.

Now information pollution isn't new. Back when social media was new and I first saw its share/retweet/boost buttons I thought "great, we've created fully automated chain letter distribution systems". Chain letters, emotionally manipulative missives without a concern for the truth that try to get replicated, used to be rare. I got one as a child, but to pass it along required laborious copying by hand. Email made them easier to distribute. Social media allows us to spread and track highly optimized manipulative bullshit effortlessly.

When LLMs came on the scene, my response was "great, now we've created industrial scale bullshit generators". These tools can do great harm when in the hands of nefarious users, but as this article demonstrates, it doesn't actually require people who actively want to do harm. Just people who don't fully understand the drawbacks of these systems, people who are lazy, people who want to make a buck, people who are a bit casual with this stuff as it's not their primary concern. I've just described all of us, at least on a bad day.

Bad information is trivial to produce and regurgitate, yet fact checking it takes a long time. It took me a while to do the digging and write this article, for instance.

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it"

This was already true before AI, but AI can make this a lot worse.

I'm Dutch. A large part of the landscape of my country would not be there without a lot of water management. We've had hundreds of years to figure it out. We have elected independent regional bodies solely charged with the management of surface water.

Meanwhile we, humans, are letting our information landscape turn into a bog. A lot of effort is required if we want to keep from sinking into slop.

Conclusion

I did enjoy this weird journey discovering a man who did not exist. It's fascinating to consider how in an information society a mythical figure such as Jung-Koch Quentell can be created by accident.

It demonstrates how easy it is to casually pollute our information landscape.

In the past I've seen @futurebird complain about AI generated slop about ants. Unfortunately this exists. This is a topic she knows a lot about, so she can detect what's wrong.

When I said, after hours of digging, that I thought this whole biography was likely complete AI slop, this was her response:

WHY.

I mean I know why. But good lord this is annoying. And this is the dreaded "out of my wheelhouse" case. I don't do much with history, I'm not an expert and have average understanding at best.

This really sucks!

I concur with this analysis. I'm a fan of history, but I was taken in by this biography as much as she was. It felt uncomfortable I found this biography on the website of a seller, and by the fact that there was no Wikipedia entry, but initially I was convinced this version of Quentell existed.

The internet is truly in for a wild ride, and I don't think most people see this coming. How do we ensure we have a healthy, prosperous information landscape in this era of advertising, tracking, social media and AI? Humanity needs to figure out what to do about this. ⁸

Postscript 1: Jung-Koch-Quentell on Wikipedia

While the individuals may not warrant their own Wikipedia pages, the Jung-Koch-Quentell collective evidently had a big impact on culture, that's lasting until this Their works are being sold by many sellers. But Wikipedia doesn't mention it; I'm still half in doubt I missed something! I invite readers to start a Wikipedia page on this. It will have to start as a stub, but I'm sure if we keep digging we can find out more real information. And we might want to mention the bogus information floating about as well.

Postscript 2: LLMs on Quentell

I don't know what prompt was used to generate the bogus bio, what LLM was used and when. LLMs have changed a lot in the last few years. Let's take a casual look at what they do in late 2024.

Here's what the free ChatGPT has to say:

Jung-Koch-Quentell is not a single person but rather a collective pseudonym associated with a famous series of educational botanical and biological wall charts.

Oh wow. It got it right! Unfortunately after getting that right, it starts freely confabulating information about Jung, Koch and Quentell. Here's what it has to say about Quentell in that same answer for instance:

Franz Quentell (1852–1933): A publisher and entrepreneur who facilitated the printing and distribution of the charts.

Just completely bogus. Even the first name is wrong.

When I ask about just "Quentell, the illustrator of educational materials", it correctly talks about Heinrich Jung and Gottlieb von Koch, but then starts regurgitating the wrong biographical information from site X, which it mentions in its sources. That's not great, though arguably better than what my bare web search did.

Gemini (by Google) meanwhile doesn't even mention Jung and Koch but just regurgitates the wrong bio from site X (with a link to it).

Claude 3.5 Sonnet 20241022 actually refuses to answer about "F Quentell" by itself, and when I ask about "Jung-Koch Quentell" it tells me:

I apologize, but I believe there might be a misunderstanding. Jung-Koch-Quentell was not actually a single illustrator, but rather refers to a series of educational wall charts that were produced in Germany. These botanical and zoological wall charts were created by the publishing house Frommann & Morian in the late 19th century, and the name comes from the three educators/artists who collaborated on them: Gottlieb von Koch, Friedrich Quentell, and Heinrich Jung. These charts were widely used in schools throughout Europe and were known for their detailed scientific illustrations of plants and animals.

Which is in fact entirely correct. It gives a glimmer of hope LLMs could be more than just be part of the problem.