4 ms·
It's like styrofoam stucco on the ceiling. Decoration and ornament have served always to signal extra effort that went into something, signaling that it is con
by bonoboTP 3mo ago
It's like styrofoam stucco on the ceiling.
Decoration and ornament have served always to signal extra effort that went into something, signaling that it is considered important and valued by the maker/owner. But people also have incentive to do cheaper mimicry. And then the viewers have incentive to distinguish real from fake to see where true, scarce effort went. These dynamics are crucial for understanding the feelings and emotions around AI. Value is almost never in the thing itself or some inherent quality but in the social signals and relationships. (somewhat less true in very utilitarian engineering machinery or for sustenance level basic necessities).
- RandomLensman 3mo agoThat is one use. Images (incl. icons) can also be there to structure text and provide visual clues on what is where.
- Gigachad 3mo agoIn a blog, real images signify you spent a lot of time creating the post, it was very important to you, and you likely made sure the details in the text were accurate. While AI images in a blog signify low effort high volume posting where the text likely was just copied from AI without any care.
- bonoboTP 3mo agoThe article author should have specified more closely which type of image. Stock image sites had already made generic photos and drawings cheap to include. And indeed they look cheap. The more airbrushed and high quality the cheaper it looks. If a dentist website has cheap beautiful stock nurse photos, it's less valued than real photos taken by a photographer at their location.
- PaulHoule 3mo agoOnce in a while you get a good one, one that stands out among all the others, and that's a worse outcome because the same image will be used by everybody including your competitors.
- mosura 3mo agoAt that point why have images at all? Just go full American Psycho eggshell business card.
- chaosharmonic 3mo agoThe OP doesn't have images.
- ToucanLoucan 3mo agoIt's hard to articulate this stuff, and especially hard to explain it to the AI infatuated among us because they don't really want to understand why people dislike the tooling they're obsessed with. AI is good at many things, digesting vast quantities of information, and code being most of them. Everything else to me looks/sounds like shit. AI music sounds dull and overproduced in a way that a lot of middling pop music does. AI images look overtuned and strange in the same way a magazine editor would, if they had no self control with their tools. It just... looks bad. As an aesthetic. If you are not aesthetically minded, you may not care, or you may not be able to tell, and that's fine. But I am and I can and if I open your blog post and see AI crap, I'm leaving. I'm not asking anyone else to, and I don't give a shit if my best friend in the world wants to beat his meat to your AI generated sunset, good for him, I hope he has a great time. But I'm not interested. Why these super-pro-AI people take this as such a personal slight is strange to me. You didn't care enough to actually make something, what are you offended if I tell you I don't really want to look at it?
- bonoboTP 3mo agoThe tools are getting better and often that overproduced thing is the toupee effect, where you don't notice the better ones. The generic look can be avoided with more customized prompting. You can make much more natural songs with longer prompts, a bit of quickly self-sung melodies you add as references, even if you can't sing. Similarly for images, sketching something out in paint can make a huge difference or just iterating 2 or 3 times and not accepting the first result. And the tools are going to get better too.
- Planktonne 3mo ago> especially hard to explain it to the AI infatuated among us because they don't really want to understand why people dislike the tooling they're obsessed with Your comment is an example of what the parent comment is discussing; the reflexive "you can't really tell and anyway you can do it better to stop people being able to tell and also soon it will be better so no one will be able to tell" is a gallop like the narcissist's prayer. People are telling you they can tell, and that they do care. The toupee fallacy works because there are good wigs that no one can identify unless told, but the idea that that there's actually brilliant AI prose (that no one has detected) always lacks examples.
- orangedog 3mo agoI don't think it signifies any of those things. This is all new stuff. Some people have decided to offload image-creation to machines because what they care about is the text. This stuff you say it signifies, it says more about you than them.
- qlm 3mo agoIf you don't care about the images then don't have images.
- intrasight 3mo agoOr just have a podcast so that you don't have the option to have images.
- pluralmonad 3mo agoIt bothers my brain when a longtime followed podcast changes their cover image. You conditioned my brain for years to a certain image and pattern and now you change it? How dare you!
- intrasight 3mo agoIt's so weird that they all seem to update at once - which makes me think that it's my podcast player that's periodically checking. But that sort of an opaque process for me since it's not my area of technology.
- duplessitous 3mo agoNo one ever said they didn't want images, this is a non-sequiturs
- mejutoco 3mo ago> Some people have decided to offload image-creation to machines because what they care about is the text.
- andai 3mo agoIt's not just about effort though. I prefer the authors terrible doodles over AI art any day of the week. Some of my favorite examples: https://hamberg.no/gtd https://hamberg.no/gtd https://learnyouahaskell.github.io/introduction.html https://learnyouahaskell.github.io/introduction.html
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- PunchyHamster 3mo agoIt's weird to observe that trend in house decor, first it was mark of wealth, after that when cheaper methods to replicate the look (and some might be even more smooth than doing it by hand) it flew down to cheaper and cheaper had that look, while "wealthy" moved to simpler one, often just showing off amount of space or some expensive material used. And now more simple looks trickled down too
- mrloopex 3mo agoStucco on the ceiling is done to hide imperfections from hastily installed drywall. In cheap housing constructing, every step hides the previous steps mistakes. Framing - drywall - trim - texturing - painting - decorating.
- andai 3mo agoA while ago I saw a gif of a piece of art being made. It was pretty ugly and I wasn't impressed. Then the camera zoomed and I saw that the thing had been painstakingly assembled by hand out of two million toothpicks over the course of years. Suddenly I was very impressed!
- overfeed 3mo ago> Value is almost never in the thing itself or some inherent quality. Value is in the thing itself, however, there requires a certain level of trust by the reader consumer that what they are taking part of is not a scam/bamboozle first, and hopefully worth their time, and some proof of work goes a long way. So effort used to signal that the author cares about the subject if they went through the effort of setting up a blog, writing 2000 words on a topic with some curated CC-licensed images relevant to the subject. GenAI images and LLMisms are the inverse - proof of no-work; they signal the author didn't put in effort, other than a fraction of a cent on tokens. This is why "cleaning up" your writing with LLMs is not a great idea, or makes it look low-effort. > These dynamics are crucial for understanding the feelings and emotions around AI These issues predate AI, going back to content-farms (if not earlier). The root issue is low-quality content masquerading as high-quality and authoritative. GenAI greatly lowers the bar of entry.