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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

The slop art gave me the wrong impression. I did enjoy the read even thinking it was AI though.

I'm sorry we're getting so off topic here but...

I suppose it helps to focus on the core of someone's strength, and the core of the content they are sharing.

You could be a great engineer and a great blogger, but have no skill in making graphics. If you made the artistic choice to add AI-generated art to an excellent engineering blog post, I would forgive it -- assuming it wasn't detracting in some important way.

Overall, the human skill of editing - particularly excluding that which is not additive - does remain key though.

I will say in this case, I don't know the pop song well enough to know if the AI-generated image is super relevant, or just random.

EDIT: I'm guessing it's "Kant"[0] in the image, listening to modern music. Ah... at first I thought it was like, George Washington.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant

You're absolutely right! jk. I hate this situation of "everything is slop until proven otherwise" and the author doesn't have to be good at writing and drawing just to share their thoughts. But generally you don't expect a Michelin star level meal after having a turd sandwich entrée. It's just a natural pavlovian response at this point to see slop and expect slop. Totally unfair, I agree, but really hard to get rid of it.

It's not even unfair. It's just a heuristic that occasionally gives incorrect results. We and the author would have both been better off skipping the illustration.

The real problem is that "serious content creators" believe (as far as I can tell anyway) that they must have a cover image to make the article appealing or set the mood or whatever. They might even be right as far as the actually reader is concerned, but either way this is the real disease, and it's decades older than LLMs.

You don't have to be an artist! Just draw stickman doodles, it shows personality and effort, and I will respect you a billion times more than Promptbert Sloppenheimer.

Due to that image, I immediately copy pasted it to pangram before reading the author's note. Interestingly enough it marked it all as AI generated that has "been paraphrased or rewritten". I am not sure I trust that though, and I want to give the benefit of the doubt to the author's claim because the article itself was not bad in the end anyway, and I also enjoyed reading it. I am very curious though if this was indeed a false positive.

It's not an art piece, it's a writing piece. The illustration is just there for support, not the central focus or even the topic of the article. The author is obviously a decent writer, but I don't see how they should be expected to pay an artist for a simple illustration when this article has nothing to do with said illustration. Life isn't black and white, and you'd do yourself a favor by noticing the shades of gray.

I don't think the illustration adds anything, it could simply be left out. I did enjoy the writing.

They don’t have to pay an artist for the illustration, just use a stock photo (lots of which exist). Or leave it blank (nobody needed an illustration). Having an AI image for filler seems to be in poor taste.

They could just have no "featured image"? Quasi-irrelevant featured images where already bad before AI, AI-generated ones are just 10x worse.

Anyway, it is their piece, their website, so they choose how to structure it. I just don't like the plague of obligatory featured images everywhere in general. I can understand a featured image that adds something relevant, or even simply has some artistic value in itself. But both stock images and AI-generated ones add neither.

Yeah me too. While reading I keep thinking "ok this might be ai generated but it's not slop. Good job funny man". I owe the author an apology.

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