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AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
- bwhiting2356 2y agoI think there's a vibe shift. I was obsessed with Dall-E when it first came out. Now I think these images look tacky.
- Gigachad 2y agoIt was novel and funny when it first came out. Now it's not novel and just crap. Its fine to have no image on your blog post, its better than a slop generated pic.
- nelsonfigueroa 2y agoAgreed. I still think it's cool from a technology point of view. But it doesn't inspire confidence when I see these generative images in blogs/articles.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoI spent weeks playing with Midjourney until 3am. I also can’t stand AI generated pictures anymore. Something about it being so generic and not making sense really triggers the uncanny valley sense now. If anyone is not sure what I mean, ask an AI to generate a map of your home country (or better - your metropolitan area) and you’ll see exactly why it’s so off putting
- shadowerm 2y agoEmbarrassingly, I spent even longer with Midjourney to come to the same conclusion. It really isn't an issue with AI art but the limited, uncreative output of AI art models. I suspect many artists have been removed from earlier midjourney models too as well along with human input has softened the edges overall. Then is just a matter of time that someone will comment on how you have to use stable diffusion and how much better stable diffusion is but that is because they mean "art" in the context of AI hentai. Photoshop AI fill sounds like the greatest thing ever but the output is the same useless slop, not even as good as Midjourney. Only good for press releases and cherry picked best examples. I don't like AI art in blogs because to me it is just signalling you haven't spent enough time with AI tools yet to understand these images look like shit. The other blog content then is framed in the same light.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoLooking at you here, patio11.
- tkzed49 2y agoeh, do what you want imo
- hombre_fatal 2y agoyeah, i get llm/ai bad, but this is just low effort pandering to hners.
- nelsonfigueroa 2y agoI am just expressing my hatred for AI-generated images. I am not pandering to anyone.
- raincole 2y agoYeah they discourage me as well. But what I say doesn't matter. What this person says doesn't matter. What A/B tests say matters.
- lukev 2y agoOn what measure of success? A/B tests say that Ariana Grande is about 20x better than Mozart (according to Spotify stats, actually impressed Mozart holds up so well.) So something besides popularity in the moment has to matter. Which A/B tests won't capture.
- raincole 2y ago> On what measure of success? Pageviews. Which is the reason why people put AI images (or any unnecessary stock images) in their blogposts in the first place.
- lukev 2y agoI know. It was a rhetorical question, the suggestion being that optimizing for pageviews might not actually be what creates the most value.
- karaterobot 2y agoCounterpoint: I think they usually look dumb, but seeing them does not prejudice me for or against the text of your article. To clarify, I do sometimes get mad at actual photos that are poorly chosen, and the same is true of AI-generated photos demonstrating bad art direction, bad taste, or bad judgment on the part of the author or editor. But them being obviously AI-generated has nothing to do with it. > I know there’s plenty of things you can roast my blog for but at least you know for a fact you’re getting the thoughts of a real human being and not some LLM. In fact, I cannot know that.
- __loam 2y agoUsing AI generated work in creative spaces like writing or art is a negative quality signal to me.
- Xymist 2y agoWhy? I'd venture that a plurality, if not a majority, of people who can write well cannot create good digital art, and vice-versa. The use of AI images on a blog post, assuming you're there for the written content, seems at best a very weak signal of any kind.
- john_the_writer 2y agoNah.. it means you're cool steeling others creativity. It's a strong signal that your writing from the POV of a person who doesn't object to stomping on the shoulder of giants.
- xigoi 2y agoIf you don’t have an image that adds useful information to your document, don’t add an image at all. People on slow or metered connections will thank you.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoIt does prejudice me - like bad copy. Makes me think the whole thing is probably AI generated slop/SEO spam just created for engagement or ad bucks
- minimaxir 2y agoI stopped using AI-images as social media thumbnails since a) they take a surprising amount of effort in order to make distinct and non-generic with techniques such as ControlNet [e.g. https://minimaxir.com/2023/03/new-chatgpt-overlord/featured.png https://minimaxir.com/2023/03/new-chatgpt-overlord/featured....] and b) thumbnails don't matter anymore for personal blogs since social media sharing of links is dead.
- cmdtab 2y agoWhat do you mean by dead?
- burgerrito 2y agoI'm not sure if it's the whole social media, but X (formerly Twitter) now discourage you to share links. Yes, apparently attaching a URL will rank you lower in algorithm.
- minimaxir 2y agoX/Twitter is the confirmed case, but even others sites have dropped referrals dramatically as algorithms shift. There's a reason everyone is pushing direct-to-email newsletters.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jfil 2y agoLinkedIn is also known for down-ranking posts with links. That's why you'll see people posting a URL in a separate comment on their own post. These social networks are "on the Internet" but they are not "on the Web". The Web is strengthened through linking.
- InvertedRhodium 2y agoMy take is that unless they’re hand drawn images drawn with home made pencils and paper it’s not even really art.
- davidclark 2y agoSeems like you’re trying to make a counterpoint that’s just reductio ad absurdum
- QuercusMax 2y agoEarlier this year I was visiting friends and one of them was watching some terrible YouTube videos full of ancient alien type nonsense and full of AI stock footage. Half of it didn't make any sense, and it was just a bizarre experience - mixed up nonsense blather illustration with nonsense imagery. The friend who was watching this stuff is not the brightest, and he's extremely gullible. I'd rather he just watch spiderman or something, he'd probably be better informed about the world.
- Bancakes 2y agoThat’s why Brainrot was accepted in the dictionary.
- lelanthran 2y ago> Earlier this year I was visiting friends and one of them was watching some terrible YouTube videos full of ancient alien type nonsense He didn't need to do that - there's some really great videos full of ancient alien nonsense! [EDIT - I actually like the ancient alien nonsense. It's no less credible than the various spirituality, religious, mystic or occult beliefs held by 90% of the planet. If you're judging someone's intelligence on whether they like to watch ancient alien theories/spiritual/religious/mystical/occult shows, then you're so disconnected from humanity that your opinion probably doesn't matter to anyone, anyway.]
- emptiestplace 2y agoHobbies may not always reflect intelligence, but beliefs probably do.
- lelanthran 2y ago> Hobbies may not always reflect intelligence, but beliefs probably do. And what difference do you see between a belief in $RELIGION and a belief in ancient aliens? From where I am sitting, there is more hard evidence for the existence of ancient aliens than for the existence of any $DEITY who created the world.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoI've come to feel the same. It feels very low-effort to use AI-generated content when communicating with an audience.
- nelsonfigueroa 2y agoYeah exactly!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- joegibbs 2y agoMy problem with the AI-generated images that most people use for their blogs isn't that they're AI-generated, it's that they're bad. People use, I think, mostly DALLE-3 to make these super-busy infographic type illustrations that are completely devoid of meaning because they're AI, full of mangled text and nonsense logos. They're incomprehensible, they maybe kind of convey the idea of "business" or "tech" or something like that but they make no real point. If you're going to use AI to make a blog image, use it to make something identifiable. If your blog post is about tigers, and you use a picture of a tiger, it doesn't make much of a difference if the picture is AI generated or a stock photo. You didn't take it either way. If the blog post is about your prediction on the next year of tech stocks, use the AI to make a picture of something simple like a computer rather than some kind of Bayeux Tapestry of random tech-like things.
- aragonite 2y agoMost AI-generated images I've come across (I have in mind Substacks, Medium posts and other personal blogs) are purely "decorative" & having the same (lack of) purpose as stock photography - e.g. a generic photo of people exercising in an article about fitness. In informational articles I find these pointless & also maybe somewhat in poor taste. But then I'd probably feel the same way about regular stock photography. There may be potential for AI-generated explanatory visuals though. High-quality diagrams, graphs, map of complex conceptual relationships and so on would be exciting.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoThat would need to be a whole new model that’s not based on pixels but these nodes and edges. All AI generated maps or diagrams look absolutely unhinged
- john_the_writer 2y agoThe difference between stock and AI would be how they came to be "free". Stock comes from people posing. AI comes from stealing the peoples poses.
- FloNeu 2y agoI agree - at least I take it as a red flag that the blogs content is probably also low effort slob and that I should assign it a rather low credibility
- pupppet 2y agoI wouldn’t mind the AI images if they didn’t all have that same exact same look you can spot a mile away.
- kidneystereotyp 2y ago[dead]
- edanm 2y agoI don't think using AI-generated images is bad. I also don't think using an LLM to help write an article is necessarily bad, either. They're both just tools. You're equating using these tools with low-effort. And that's often true. But not always. In our own blog/newsletter (about data and AI engineering), we spend a ton of effort doing a lot of the development work and the research work that goes into posts. Often the post is summarizing an open-source project we've released, sometimes it's summarizing research we've done, etc. But we're not skilled artists. Nor are we skilled copywriters. And many of us don't speak English as a first language, either. So we use AI to generate images, and we use LLMs to help sharpen the writing on the blog post. I don't think that makes our work low effort.
- exsomet 2y agoDevils advocate: Given a hundred articles (in say, a social media feed) and a finite amount of time and cognitive capacity, how should one decide which articles to read? If the presentation is AI generated images, and genuinely good content is otherwise “sharpened” with common AI fingerprint phrases in the excerpts and opening titles, what aspect would stop someone from equating it with other “bad” AI generated content and skipping it?
- edanm 2y agoWell, what would stop someone equating it with human-produced bad content? It's not like this is a uniquely AI phenomenon, "bad" content existed three years ago too. I think you should mostly just not use superficial characteristics like "it includes AI generated art" as much of a signal, and judge it the same way you'd judge anything else - is it from a publication you trust? Is the subject matter of interest? Does the headline and/or skimming the description + first few sentences make it seem interesting? All of those are better signals of whether it's worth reading something than superficial characteristics. After all, "don't judge a book by its cover" is a pretty common saying for a reason.
- rsynnott 2y agoI mean, consider not having images, then? Having no images is, IMO, better than having terrible filler images. Most blog posts don’t have images, and the world goes on.
- thefz 2y agoAnother thing that makes me close the page as soon as I can press CTRl-W is anime avatars, and if the blog is built like a back and forth discussion between two cartoon characters.
- 000ooo000 2y ago100% with you on the latter point. It's a shame because, so far, where I've seen those, the author does actuallly seem to have some deep knowledge or something insightful to share. But man it's so hard to look past that awful delivery.
- oehpr 2y agoWait can you give an example? I don't think I've seen that format before
- fmxsh 2y agoTo me as the viewer, AI images sometimes pass for real ones, because at a glance they successfully convey a concept. A slight sense of something being off prompts looking a bit deeper and it quickly turns into something akin to a "Spot the difference" game. Spotting one error leads to a chain reaction of finding more errors. Whatever art 'is', from a philosophical standpoint, I must assume it is more than just a medium to convey a concept. At the realization of it being generated, it sort of turns into 'un-art'. Whatever concept is conveyed by an AI image also inherently conveys the concept of "generated".
- alexhv9 2y agoI have the same feeling about Youtube video thumbnails