Stop Using Generative AI for Hero Images

More like Stop Using Hero Images

...especially ones that take several orders of magnitude more bandwidth than the article text itself.

IMHO the fact that people are using AI for them shows how little value they already have, and it's just a dogmatic "best practice" (if you could even call it that) at this point.

Ahh, the anti-AI vitriol strikes again. I think it crops up because there’s such an overwhelming emotional undercurrent of futility, like how I feel when I consider capitalism; it seems like a natural reaction to scream back, to make yourself big and draw an emphatic line in the sand, to rage, rage against the dying of the light. IMO it’s an urge to be suppressed, but no one’s a flawless automaton, me especially!

In this specific case it’s a little funny, just because the author is a photographer. Literally all of their criticisms (other than “it looks bad”, which is obviously both ephemeral and subjective) were leveled against photography about a century ago:

  “From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate.  A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers” (Baudelaire 1980, 86-87).  His biggest fear and source of bitterness was that photography was being accepted as art and “if photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art’s activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the masses, its natural ally”

For one thing: Since when is people’s ability to hire service workers like photographers relevant to the worth of their writing? Isn’t wealth discrimination something to be minimized in scholarly pursuits?