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AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

nelson.cloud

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Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#321

Post by bonoboTP »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #275
bonoboTP wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

It'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 mus…

The 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.

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#322

Post by deadbabe »

Some people are discovering the trick of “humanwashing” AI images by tracing over them by hand in standard drawing programs and applying their “taste” to produce something that looks like a human created it in the first place. What do we think of this?

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#323

Post by kerblang »

cryptopian wrote: post #52
ModernMech wrote: post #9

I find them very interesting and they make me more likely to remember your blog. I was reading that Gas Town post yesterday and despite all the backlash about the whimsical world and the ai images being sloppy and wrong, they still stuck in my brain more than anything else I’ve read this year. The author say they’d prefer Microsoft paint images but actually I don’t think this is true of most audiences. People have th…

On the other hand, plenty of art can lean into being intentionally brash and be all the more memorable for it. The phrase "bad MS paint blog" immediately makes me think of Hyperbole and a Half[1] where the style feeds into the zany ADHD vibe of the blog. Often, you find ugliness and rule breaking as a backlash to an overly polished status quo. AM radio rock gave way to punk, hair metal gave way to grunge, and EDM gav…

Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff is still one of the worst greatest of all time

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/sweetbroandhellajeff/?cid=0...

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#324

Post by ghaff »

michaelt wrote: post #289
orangedog wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

Some use of hero images by bloggers is a deliberate style choice, to emulate the norms of professional journalism. A lot of traditional news outlets have a style rule that every article must have an image. Look at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.economist.com etc - every article has an image. Even a report on something highly abstract - "BP reports record profits" - will be illustrated…

People who know more about the topic than I do will argue for a default image for an online article for SEO and other reasons. Online pubs I've done stuff for would usually take a good/relevant photo if you have one. But, otherwise, would generally use some fairly generic stock graphic from some service they subscribed to.

Same goes for book covers. You probably need something unless you want to look really generic and cheap. But I'm mostly not going to pay a designer hundreds+ of dollars for a cover of an independently published book. I have had a former colleague who is actually good with this sort of thing do it in the past. I've also done a crappy job myself, done it in conjunction with a publisher (for whom I had the supply the cover image), and, yes, used generative AI/Photoshop.

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#325

Post by inigyou »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #66
inigyou wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually practical advice to avoid wasting your time on nonsense.

Plot twist, 100% likely you've read and shared humanized AI content. If you read the summary/abstract and nope out because there's nothing interesting or insightful, whatever, but if you were interested in subject of the article and its assertions and you nope out because of an AI writing tic, that's just toolish.

Plot twist, applying practical advice to avoid wasting time doesn't mean that you never waste time.

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#326

Post by inigyou »

kstenerud wrote: post #266
noosphr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually well formatted blogs won't be a symbol of effort and no one will care.

Just like published books were considered a symbol of effort that no one would have considered a blog as being anywhere near. When was the last time you looked up a book to find an answer to your question? That USED to be the normal. Then we just googled for a link to Stack Overflow. And the oldtimers waxed lyrical on Slashdot, bemoaning the loss of craftsmanship, and how it was too easy nowadays - no effort. What ha…

Both blogs and books are mostly spam now, anyway.

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#328

Post by Planktonne »

bonoboTP wrote: post #321
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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 mus…

The 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…

> 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.

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#329

Post by abustamam »

palmotea wrote: post #282
debugnik wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I encountered AI-generated food photos on a menu for the first time. I immediately felt grossed out before even realising why. Their generated focaccias didn't even look like food, just off-putting trypophobia triggers.

> Yesterday I encountered AI-generated food photos on a menu for the first time. I immediately felt grossed out before even realising why. Their generated focaccias didn't even look like food, just off-putting trypophobia triggers. Also, that's just misleading. When I see pictures of food on a menu, I expect them to be real pictures of an example of the actual dish I'd get (perhaps made a little more carefully with m…

Not that either are OK, but McDonalds basically stages their food to make it look more appealing, adding stuff that isn't in the product to make it look nicer.

https://youtu.be/pSYw8LTXXJM?is=FsJwTFKUkeDt1Z2Y

Tangentially, I kinda like the idea of Doordashs crowd sourced food images. Take a Pic of your food before you eat and get like a $5 discount if it is chosen. Customers are not likely to manipulate the product (they may stage it nicely like you mentioned but won't put browning agent or other additives to make it shinier).

Re: AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

#330

Post by Thanemate »

wateralien wrote: post #21

AI-generated images discourage me from interacting with any entity AT ALL. Bar / restaurant posters, events, shops, anything. Because it makes the brand appear lazy. And in a weird way "anti-human". I don't have a better word than that.

Last Christmas I caught our municipality (I'm from Greece) posting announcements about Christmas events on brochures that were choke full of obvious AI-generated images with Santa Claus, deer, trees, etc. and my first reaction was wondering exactly how hard would it have been if they were to hire artist(s) from our region, even if it was volunteer work, to have them promote their work instead. That's what a community is about.
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