Poll HN: How do you feel about AI generated images on blog posts? | Hacker News Reader

Poll HN: How do you feel about AI generated images on blog posts?

4 pointslexicality8 comments

Hi HN, happy new year!

Over 2025 I noticed more and more submissions with obviously AI generated cover images, usually customised to the content of the blog post. I'm not entirely sure if that's because I've got better at spotting AI images or if they've just become much more accessible to the casual blogger.

Without wanting to open the massive can of worms around if hero images are even necessary or what should go on them, I'm curious to know if you've noticed the same trend and if it affects your perception of the article before you read it?

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I tried my best to keep the question neutral but you can probably guess I'm not a huge fan of this trend

Sure, it's cute to see a Studio Ghibli re-enactment of your blog post but then I'm always left wondering if I'm going to spend more time reading the article than the author took to write it. It kind of ruins my enjoyment of the indieweb if I end up looking suspiciously at dashes. Could this have been a twitter thread with a few photos and the raw prompts instead?

All that being said, I've been trying to work out if this is another thing I should let go. With how outrage-fuelled social media is these days I've been working on being less judgemental of others if it doesn't directly affect me.

20 years ago you could have perfectly civil conversations on forums with people with usernames xXx_ShadowFox69_xXx and typically the contents of their messages was more important than how cringy their signature was. Maybe this is just an unfortunate part of the modern web I should look past, even if I don't like it?

I dislike them very much. They generally add no value whatsoever to the material and they all tend to have the same lousy esthetics. They are both pointless and tasteless.

But given the pathological groupthink that pervades the "tech industry," I expect to see more and more of them.

If I see AI images on your blogpost, I assume you used AI to write the post as well, and I'm no longer interested.

Is there an option for "Done well" and "Done poorly"?

As a case study, there is a Substack I follow with a guy who does original research. I've been following him before he started using AI images and once he started, I noticed that there was attention to detail in his images, in that they were highly relevant and unique to that article, sometimes including humor, and in general, you could tell he had actually thought about the image he posted. In his case, the AI art is mostly neutral for me. It doesn't affect my perception much one way or another.

On the done poorly end of the spectrum, when I go do a blog and every image is in the same style and is some variation of a robot or a person in front of a chalkboard (with the title or thesis on it) teaching other robots or people, I certainly think "Slop!" In that case, I more often feel that images are degrading content that might actually be decent and that no image would be better than this. I don't often come back, though.

Yeah if someone uses mid journey to do something unique, or even uses an editing model to make a specific picture for some purpose, that could be fine. On the other end of the spectrum is those yellow-tinged ChatGPT generated images that all look the same - they seem the most common and indicate someone didn’t care at all.

Not a fan of AI making anything

This. Every time I catch myself thinking "depends on its purpose..." I have to remind myself of this. The negative social and environmental costs of AI overwhelm any supposed benefit.

depends on how tasteful it is

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