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AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

nelson.cloud

361–370 of 493 posts

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

#361
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…

A 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!

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In 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.

It'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://learnyouahaskell.github.io/introduction.html

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

#364
post #15

What I read , my western ego is so big I want to place my opinion everywhere possible . Image is content , ai can generate art level images and an obvious slop . To read or or not is absolutely up to reader , not someone’s entitled opinion .

Isn't the point of a blog to "place my opinion everywhere possible"? Isn't that why there's an internet?

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

#365

If a content is making a positive impact on your life, your mental health, your family's well being, your general outlook, your future, would it matter if is from AI or from human?

It doesn't seem to be though, and there's no reason to assume it will magically become so. We don't do the same with every other negative: suppose global warming made you immortal, wouldn't that be great.

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

#366

> at least you know for a fact you’re getting the thoughts of a real human being No, we don't. For all we know this whole blog is an agent larping as a neverLLMer. Your stance says nothing about who wrote what. Just as using images freely generated by ChatGPT for a PERSONAL blog post because the author liked it but couldn't express it themselves doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the post. It tells you th…

I've developed an internal heuristic that tells me people who think an AI image to fill some blank space in any way improves anything aren't saying anything of value. There's a strong likelihood they're just trying to promote some product or scam. I came to this conclusion after seeing 100% of sites with AI images plastered on them being scams and BS with no actual value.

Meanwhile, a blog that's basic HTML and text and looks like it's fresh from 1998 is generally high quality info. People who are willing to write like that and publicly share it have confidence in what they're writing. And if that blog spreads, it's because the content is good. Not because it was eye catching at a glance.

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

#368

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 biggest mistake is thinking that your aesthetics are "correct". You make it a personal slight when you espouse, that your aesthetic preferences are universal and then farther malign people with different preferences by saying that they are not aesthecticly minded.

[dead]

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

#369

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…

There was a thing about a year ago where YouTubers were holding lapel mics in their hands to show they don't really know what they're doing, on purpose, to differentiate themselves from the big players.

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use. I seem to recall many instances of the use of incorrect photos, and the earliest I heard of was in the The Guardian in the 1980s before the general decline in media quality and standards.

Yes, the current standards did arise out of a lot of questionable behaviour. It's awfully tempting for a war photojournalist to pose the group of tearful women in front of the bombed-out building across town. Or for the celeb gossip reporter to collage together two photos without making it clear it's a collage. Or for the person colour-correcting a photo of a divisive figure to lighten or darken their skin. And the r…

are there any serious journalists any more? If so, who?
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