Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

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Some use of hero images by bloggers is a deliberate style choice, to emulate the norms of professional journalism.

A lot of traditional news outlets have a style rule that every article must have an image. Look at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.economist.com etc - every article has an image. Even a report on something highly abstract - "BP reports record profits" - will be illustrated with a photograph of some BP-branded fuel pumps. Stories on things like cybersecurity and inflation get generic images like snippets of blurry computer code, banknotes etc.

Some bloggers feel their blog is improved by adopting the style of professional journalism, and (among other things) put an image on every article. Even if for a programming blog good lead images are hard to come by.

Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use. They have rules on everything from illustrating one rocket launch with a photo of another to posing the subjects to colour-correcting images to creating multi-image collages. So I don't imagine we'll see many AI-generated images in traditional news outlets any time soon.

People who know more about the topic than I do will argue for a default image for an online article for SEO and other reasons. Online pubs I've done stuff for would usually take a good/relevant photo if you have one. But, otherwise, would generally use some fairly generic stock graphic from some service they subscribed to.

Same goes for book covers. You probably need something unless you want to look really generic and cheap. But I'm mostly not going to pay a designer hundreds+ of dollars for a cover of an independently published book. I have had a former colleague who is actually good with this sort of thing do it in the past. I've also done a crappy job myself, done it in conjunction with a publisher (for whom I had the supply the cover image), and, yes, used generative AI/Photoshop.

Someone paying hundreds for a good cover design is a signifier that a lot of effort went in to the book and the cover reflects that. An AI cover signifies that this is a quick rush out the door cash grab book that likely isn’t worth reading.

There was a thing about a year ago where YouTubers were holding lapel mics in their hands to show they don't really know what they're doing, on purpose, to differentiate themselves from the big players.

> Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use.

I seem to recall many instances of the use of incorrect photos, and the earliest I heard of was in the The Guardian in the 1980s before the general decline in media quality and standards.

Yes, the current standards did arise out of a lot of questionable behaviour.

It's awfully tempting for a war photojournalist to pose the group of tearful women in front of the bombed-out building across town. Or for the celeb gossip reporter to collage together two photos without making it clear it's a collage. Or for the person colour-correcting a photo of a divisive figure to lighten or darken their skin.

And the resulting rules are complex and at times judgement-based, because posing subjects is allowed in some circumstances, collages are sometimes allowed, some colour adjustment is allowed, and so on.

Still, serious journalists aren't going to be illustrating their articles about US-Iran negotiations with chatgpt any time soon.

are there any serious journalists any more? If so, who?

I recall some rather awkward/amusing examples of this in media reports on certain video games. It's better now, but at one point, about half the featured images for articles about the game Super Mario World used some random pic from DeviantArt to represent the game (despite said art looking nothing like the original title), while a similar number of articles about Super Mario 64 represented it with a screenshot of the ROM hack Super Mario Star Road.

No-one knows exactly how said images ended up getting this sort of usage. Presumably some random journalist was on Google Images one day, come across pics that looked vaguely like what they remembered the games to look like, and just kinda went with it.

I also remember quite a few cases where fan-made box art mockups got accidentally used as the pictures of the real thing, and when the BBC used a logo from Halo to represent a real-life organisation.

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