AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
nelson.cloud
nelson.cloud
The friend who was watching this stuff is not the brightest, and he's extremely gullible. I'd rather he just watch spiderman or something, he'd probably be better informed about the world.
He didn't need to do that - there's some really great videos full of ancient alien nonsense!
[EDIT - I actually like the ancient alien nonsense. It's no less credible than the various spirituality, religious, mystic or occult beliefs held by 90% of the planet. If you're judging someone's intelligence on whether they like to watch ancient alien theories/spiritual/religious/mystical/occult shows, then you're so disconnected from humanity that your opinion probably doesn't matter to anyone, anyway.]
And what difference do you see between a belief in $RELIGION and a belief in ancient aliens?
From where I am sitting, there is more hard evidence for the existence of ancient aliens than for the existence of any $DEITY who created the world.
To clarify, I do sometimes get mad at actual photos that are poorly chosen, and the same is true of AI-generated photos demonstrating bad art direction, bad taste, or bad judgment on the part of the author or editor. But them being obviously AI-generated has nothing to do with it.
> I know there’s plenty of things you can roast my blog for but at least you know for a fact you’re getting the thoughts of a real human being and not some LLM.
In fact, I cannot know that.
These social networks are "on the Internet" but they are not "on the Web". The Web is strengthened through linking.
There's a reason everyone is pushing direct-to-email newsletters.
If you're going to use AI to make a blog image, use it to make something identifiable. If your blog post is about tigers, and you use a picture of a tiger, it doesn't make much of a difference if the picture is AI generated or a stock photo. You didn't take it either way. If the blog post is about your prediction on the next year of tech stocks, use the AI to make a picture of something simple like a computer rather than some kind of Bayeux Tapestry of random tech-like things.
It really isn't an issue with AI art but the limited, uncreative output of AI art models. I suspect many artists have been removed from earlier midjourney models too as well along with human input has softened the edges overall.
Then is just a matter of time that someone will comment on how you have to use stable diffusion and how much better stable diffusion is but that is because they mean "art" in the context of AI hentai.
Photoshop AI fill sounds like the greatest thing ever but the output is the same useless slop, not even as good as Midjourney. Only good for press releases and cherry picked best examples.
I don't like AI art in blogs because to me it is just signalling you haven't spent enough time with AI tools yet to understand these images look like shit. The other blog content then is framed in the same light.
There may be potential for AI-generated explanatory visuals though. High-quality diagrams, graphs, map of complex conceptual relationships and so on would be exciting.
You're equating using these tools with low-effort. And that's often true. But not always.
In our own blog/newsletter (about data and AI engineering), we spend a ton of effort doing a lot of the development work and the research work that goes into posts. Often the post is summarizing an open-source project we've released, sometimes it's summarizing research we've done, etc.
But we're not skilled artists. Nor are we skilled copywriters. And many of us don't speak English as a first language, either. So we use AI to generate images, and we use LLMs to help sharpen the writing on the blog post.
I don't think that makes our work low effort.
Given a hundred articles (in say, a social media feed) and a finite amount of time and cognitive capacity, how should one decide which articles to read?
If the presentation is AI generated images, and genuinely good content is otherwise “sharpened” with common AI fingerprint phrases in the excerpts and opening titles, what aspect would stop someone from equating it with other “bad” AI generated content and skipping it?
I think you should mostly just not use superficial characteristics like "it includes AI generated art" as much of a signal, and judge it the same way you'd judge anything else - is it from a publication you trust? Is the subject matter of interest? Does the headline and/or skimming the description + first few sentences make it seem interesting?
All of those are better signals of whether it's worth reading something than superficial characteristics. After all, "don't judge a book by its cover" is a pretty common saying for a reason.
But what I say doesn't matter. What this person says doesn't matter. What A/B tests say matters.
A/B tests say that Ariana Grande is about 20x better than Mozart (according to Spotify stats, actually impressed Mozart holds up so well.)
So something besides popularity in the moment has to matter. Which A/B tests won't capture.
Pageviews. Which is the reason why people put AI images (or any unnecessary stock images) in their blogposts in the first place.