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AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

nelson.cloud

421–430 of 493 posts

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

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the average person just doesn’t really notice. Yes, this is what's insulting about it, the assumption that it won't be noticed.

People also confuse “didn’t notice” with “didn’t confront me about”. People noticed, they just didn’t want cause a conflict over it.

Yes I don't really bother to call out AI images or writing, I tend to just block the domain and not look back.

Maybe a few strikes if the content is otherwise substantial, but it's a very easy and reliable smell so far.

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

#422
post #17

This hasn’t been my wife’s experience at all. She manually writes all her content, but uses AI images as sizzlers for the scenes (fan fic for popular shows). Short of getting the actors together for a million bucks, she’d be hard pressed to make these scenes a reality. It’s also supposed to be aspirational, like “what if the tv cast got back together for another season hey?” I think the average person just doesn’t re…

TFA is not about fanfic, which seems like a natural fit for illustration, but about technical blogs that really don't need it and are instead stuffed with distractingly fancy slop images.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process. Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it. https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/ I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made wi…

Can you show me one AI image with artistic value?

These artists are pretty cool:

- https://andreaciulu.com/ - https://www.rooperainisto.com/

You might feel differently, but I feel intention and effort being communicated here.

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

#424

I’m inclined to agree, but not as much because the image was generated with AI but rather because it’s rare for such images to exhibit taste. They feel like the visual equivalent of gilded twinkies, which is offputting. Selecting a stock image doesn’t have this effect, even if it’s not related to the post. Even the most unremarkable stock image has the fingerprints of its artist, and the choice itself can reveal thin…

If an LLM has any taste, it comes from its training data.

Taste is about matching things. If you stick Van Gogh's Starry Night into a blog post about profitmaxxing because you know it increases your discoverability by 0.02%, you have no taste. If you stick a pleasingly-proportioned image of a sailboat bobbing peacefully on a calm sea at sunset on a blog post about getting away from it all, it might be a perfect fit.

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

#425
post #8

To me there are different motivations to include imagery and some of them are just fine with AI generation. If the imagery actually goes to the substance of helping to illustrate or explain the actual content then it seems very superficial to reject it based on how it was generated. In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way. The problem com…

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

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To summarize, this is a "you" problem. Just because YOU do not think there's anything special about art, it does not mean there isn't. Your lack of respect for art does not undermine the thing itself. You cannot have your GenAI products included with "art" simply because you want to. You aren't entitled to having your prompt outputs held in the same esteem. > If somebody spends hours prompting various resources and c…

> Your lack of respect for art does not undermine the thing itself. Don't you see how this can be said for your feelings about AI art? Everything you're saying about AI art, someone once said about some other emergent art form. Photography, CGI, digital illustration, synthetic music... with just as much conviction as you're displaying here. But you'd agree those other things have become artforms, yes? To preempt the…

What other people have said about other, unrelated things has no bearing on what I'm saying about this particular thing. The illogical conclusions of nameless "others" are not an argument against my current conclusions. You're treating me as guilty by association.

You're also making an assumption that AI's acceptance WILL follow, just because the others were later accepted. You can't make that assumption at all.

Neither of these arguments are in good faith.

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

#427
post #300

Fair enough. I dislike word-expansion AI text so I get it. When I write on my blog, part of it is as memory like a diary for myself and I find that I can create these images that help remember the scene well. As much as I'd like people to read my blog, I get that they have preferences, and if many decide against then that's their prerogative. Here are two examples with AI images from Nano Banana: https://wiki.roshang…

it seems kind of perverse to to generate an image of a scene (fundamentally not derived from how it actually looked) to remember how it looked; you even immediately point out a way that it's inaccurate ("They looked younger and in better shape but you get the picture.")

It's pretty neat, actually. If you use Gemini's Nano Banana with a photo reference, it's pretty good at keeping most of the things that matter. I walk down 4th Street daily and that's pretty much what it looks like near Berry St.

And the thing I'm trying to remember is not, say, her athleisure or his white jacket. I'm trying to remember a couple with a dog with the man carrying a bag and a garbage grabber.

This notion of precision is actually an interesting thing to me. It's a question of what I'm trying to memorialize. Their clothes or their fitness or the colour of their dog doesn't matter so much.

You know, like some people object to statues of John Muir because he said some things like calling indigenous people "dirty and irregular" and stuff like that. But I think statues don't memorialize the man, they memorialize the symbolic man. The actual John Muir is dead, and we have his memetic descendant John Muir The Image. John Muir the image is a chalk drawing of John Muir the man, and the fact that the latter liked a dog, or hated boiled potatoes, or loved a woman, or whatever is irrelevant to me. I have taken this person, and flattened him on a canvas, and painted his acts on them as a guideline for myself. The rest of him is gone. And I like it that way.

I've had this as a draft post on the blog for a while so if you don't quite get what I'm saying about this accepted imprecision, it's probably because I haven't yet found a way to write this idea out in a clearer way.

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

#428
post #8

To me there are different motivations to include imagery and some of them are just fine with AI generation. If the imagery actually goes to the substance of helping to illustrate or explain the actual content then it seems very superficial to reject it based on how it was generated. In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way. The problem com…

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 feel…

> 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.

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

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your lack of respect for art does not undermine the thing itself. Don't you see how this can be said for your feelings about AI art? Everything you're saying about AI art, someone once said about some other emergent art form. Photography, CGI, digital illustration, synthetic music... with just as much conviction as you're displaying here. But you'd agree those other things have become artforms, yes? To preempt the…

What other people have said about other, unrelated things has no bearing on what I'm saying about this particular thing. The illogical conclusions of nameless "others" are not an argument against my current conclusions. You're treating me as guilty by association. You're also making an assumption that AI's acceptance WILL follow, just because the others were later accepted. You can't make that assumption at all. Neit…

How are they not in good faith?
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