Totally off topic but I am getting tired of the AI generated images used on nearly all blog posts nowadays. They are instantly recognisable, it just seems low effort and lowers the feeling of quality one might otherwise have
I enjoyed this writeup by Michael Lynch on finding an illustrator [1], for their blog. In doing some of my own writing, I've really found it enlightening how much secondary work goes into publishing your own work. I often think its so nice to be able to _just_ plug in what I want on a site and get a (more or less) free illustration. But as someone selling their own work / time, it feels wrong. I'd rather pay a real human and build a relationship and have something more quality. On the other hand, though, it can be expensive, time consuming, and I've been screwed over. Often it seems like a bigger risk than its worth.
So idk, you're trading some hardship and risk for an ethical dilemma but ease of use.
> Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
> If so, then, maybe all those images aren’t adding a lot to your article. At the very least, leave Taft there! You just admitted it looks better.
Also, a thumbnail tip: square thumbnails are bad. If you have to use a square 1024x1024 AI generation, crop it to something like 1024x575, which incidentally can make things difficult if using AI generation since figuring out what to crop requires human intervention.
I don’t know how good they are, but people have trained models on that problem. Googling “autocrop tool” gives me multiple options.
To each their own, though, of course.
At least they could try and generate something where I can't see malformed bodies within seconds. Or create a nice diagram that actually adds something to the text.
In the end it's just 2x 40kb
Also like 7 font files for ~100kb
The default thumbnails in lieu of your own aren't good.
This doesn't mean you need a giant hero header, or an AI generated image, or even any images in your posts at all.
"Making clicks more likely" is a terrible measure of genuine value.
There are lots of images which will make people click, even if once they see your page they click 'Back' a second later. Our metrics are broken if we continue to attribute that click as 'success'.
Genuine value, to who? For the author, getting more clicks is probably of "genuine value", depending on their goals for their writing. But seems most people are not writing and publishing stuff today because they think it provides value to others, but because they think it'll provide value to themselves somehow.
No.
Generated or hand drawn, they're kinda a wasted effort on a technical post.
Stock images used to hide this "quality" better than I thought.
Maybe they have no artistic ability of their own? Maybe they just aren't good at finding the kinds of images (that can be freely used without infringing on anyone's copyright) that they need?
If it were me, and the guidance was "never use AI generated images in your blog post", I would probably just not use any images at all. Which I guess for some people would probably be best. But personally I prefer walls of text to be broken up by... something.
In the past I’ve used lots of screenshots which seems to work well.
Where I have used images I have cut and pasted and used things like canva but nothing has ever really ended up as I would have liked it.
"to the trained eye you can already see that every single ai generated image is a picture of the same thing"