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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Of all the things I do with AI, art is probably the one I do the most. When you create written content on the internet, "the algorithm" rewards you more if you add art to it. I am not an artist, but I can write good.

So when I'm done writing, I pop over to my AI image generator, describe a few images I want, pop them into the post, and away I go! And then boom, greater engagement. As an added bonus, I don't have to worry about copyright, because at the moment copyright law considers me the creator if I modify it or the AI (which makes it uncopywriteable). So I'm in the clear there (for now).

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Kinda understandable, but as a consumer, I already dislike that a lot.

In the beginning, AI 'art' was novel and interesting in a way. But now I've already seen so much generic illustrations, and in 95% they don't add any value to a blog post. I'm even less likely to click on links with a generated thumbnail these days. It creates an expectation of SEO spam or low quality and I have to wonder if the author also used AI to write the text. The generated images seem so soulless to me.

As a creator, I dislike it too. I'd love it if the platforms would just show you my content without the pictures. But the pictures are what make people click, so I'm stuck.

It's the same reason online recipes have life stories. Because Google rewards longer pages. So now you have to do that just to get seen, even if you don't want to.

> But the pictures are what make people click

I wonder if that's a conscious or sub-conscious decision on the clickers part? It's hard to imagine anyone is consciously motivated to click on an article because of an AI generated picture.

The life story recipes are the worst.

Personally, I like a shitty 1min hand-drawn stick figure a thousand times more than a generated image. But I'm probably a minority here. You're right, it's not what Google and SEO incentivizes.

This is not creating art, but illustration. Art is where the meaning is inherent to the work, whereas illustration is when it is derived from something else that it accompanies (e.g. a text). There’s obviously a spectrum here, but GenAI blogpost decoration are pretty much the terminal point on the illustration part of that scale.

The world is topsy turvy. I can't even tell satire anymore or whether people are being sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek. This comment reads like sarcasm to me, overdoing on the things currently crappy about online "content creation":

0. The word "content" itself and self-applying the "content creator" label. No writer, artist, or musician I know thinks of themself unironically as a creator of content. How bland! Like a manufacturer! I produce units of content. My buddy who plays the saxophone and does a little composing would barf if you told him he was an audio content creator.

1. Feeding the algorithm. Do people really think about what "the algorithm" wants when they are being creative? Do they alter what they make to suit the algorithm? Why care what an unfeeling search engine wants if you're ultimately writing for the human soul?

2. Engagement as a goal. Is this really what you're after when you write? Not to inform, educate, please, inspire, upset, challenge, upend, or some other meaty goal? You just want some kind of generic "engagement"? This is the kind of thing a Marketing SVP wants, not a writer!

Sorry, I don't mean to attack. I'm trying to avoid being cynical, but the comment really struck me. I can't believe someone would write something like this about their creative passion, to the point where I question that maybe it was amazing sarcasm.

Sir, this is 2025. If you’re not the content creator you are the content.

What you've described is the exact mechanism through which generative AI will actually kill search on the open web.

It's less likely that search will be threatened by the alternative of Q&A with a chatbot as much as by slop overrunning valuable content. More and more of the discoverable content will be machine-generated filler produced for exactly the reason you describe, it's rewarded by rankings.

People won't even bother writing on their own, let alone producing images to go with the writing. It'll be like the herculean task of just finding a damn recipe online without reading someone's life story first, but 1000x as bad. It's already here I guess. We've seen the baby peacocks in the coalmine.

Once I was an editorial illustrator, and the mantra always was "concept is king". Stick figures are kosher so long as they communicate something.

Impressionists emerged following the invention of the camera, as they had no more incentive to pursue realism. I think in the age of AI slop any form of crude image making is better so long as it's human. Scribble something out with crayons. Shape an animal out of a slice of bread, post a pic. It's all legit now, technical art abilities mean nothing. To impress you actually have to have a good idea.

This is actually reflected even in the AI slop. Most pictures look broadly appealing and correct, but very generic. So to draw a crowd it has to stand out some other way - be it the lighting, the colors, the materials, the framing, the poses, the setting, or whatever else. They really made me reevaluate what is it that I'm actually looking for and how much I value each of these aspects.

Isn't it amazing when a good chunk of monetary incentive in the present day is directed towards the terrifying concept of "engagement"?

Use free stock photos instead. Your content will look less spammy.

Would you consider the images you create to be art?

Of course. The writing I create is art too. There is still creativity involved: I still have to come up with the prompt for the AI.

Edit: Retracting my original statement.

I never said anything about the degree. Of course my art is not as valuable as someone who has spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. But both are still art.

You're going to fall of that high horse of yours and break something. Most art for blogs before AI was shitty stock photos, maybe with a filter applied. It was not high art. It wasn't a major creative endeavor. It was a means to get Google with it's toxic ranking to bubble a blog post higher than the low effort copy/paste slop.

Google ranks a text-only page lower than one with a hero image. It ranks pages with a single image lower than one with multiple images. The stock art industry had long ago devalued actual art on the web selling vast collections of stock photos for a few dollars or giving away dreck for free.

AI tools have put no more actual artists out of work than Shutterstock or Unsplash. At least with an AI tool someone can make a hero image slightly more creative than "vaguely ethnic woman looking at computer" or a n out of focus picture of a dandelion.

TIL hero images on blogs are a valid metric when discussing art as a concept. If that's your primary exposure you're uniquely unqualified to have an opinion.

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