To me there are different motivations to include imagery and some of them are just fine with AI generation. If the imagery actually goes to the substance of helping to illustrate or explain the actual content then it seems very superficial to reject it based on how it was generated. In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way.
The problem comes when the imagery is placed as a false value signal. If it is designed to send a signal of "this content took a lot of effort to produce because an image that would be hard for a human to make is attached to it" - but the image was generated without that effort, then it's basically a lie and insult to the reader.
Decoration and ornament have served always to signal extra effort that went into something, signaling that it is considered important and valued by the maker/owner. But people also have incentive to do cheaper mimicry. And then the viewers have incentive to distinguish real from fake to see where true, scarce effort went. These dynamics are crucial for understanding the feelings and emotions around AI. Value is almost never in the thing itself or some inherent quality but in the social signals and relationships. (somewhat less true in very utilitarian engineering machinery or for sustenance level basic necessities).
In a blog, real images signify you spent a lot of time creating the post, it was very important to you, and you likely made sure the details in the text were accurate.
While AI images in a blog signify low effort high volume posting where the text likely was just copied from AI without any care.
The article author should have specified more closely which type of image. Stock image sites had already made generic photos and drawings cheap to include. And indeed they look cheap. The more airbrushed and high quality the cheaper it looks. If a dentist website has cheap beautiful stock nurse photos, it's less valued than real photos taken by a photographer at their location.
I don't think it signifies any of those things. This is all new stuff. Some people have decided to offload image-creation to machines because what they care about is the text.
This stuff you say it signifies, it says more about you than them.
It's about experience visiting many sites and spotting a correlation. There is a very bottom of slop, the equivalent of the chumbox from earlier. But on the higher end it may be more like you say. If there are other indicators of quality, I wouldn't penalize it for AI use. It's like having lots of piercings and torn clothes. You may be a genius scholar who is kinda into this as a hobby or you may be an actual lowlife who can't hold down a job and gets into trouble with the law all the time.
People will always make snap judgments, you can't inspect every website in detail. So if you use AI, make sure there are some other signals of quality.
>In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way.
Communicating low effort used to be insulting to the consumer, yet now I'm expected to praise it? I understand that we're not talking about monetary exchange, but we're still talking about my finite time in this world, time that I could've been invest reading or looking at something else.
So we're going back to my favorite adage these days: If you cannot spend time writing it, I refuse to spend time reading it.
In fact, the moment I realize someone's content is AI generated, I just feed the links (youtube -> transcript, blog posts -> link) to chatGPT and have it generate a summary. That's because if you're in favor of using your time efficiently then so am I.
Clipart exists, free use art exists, the Gimp Green Pepper stamp tool exists. I would read a blog with extensive pepper stamp art before something with over the top hacker aesthetic AI generated slop art.
The only reason most of my blog posts have an image at all is because social media seems to want some type of thumbnail image to go with the post. If I don't have something, many of them seem to just grab my logo instead which seems...spammier.
I try to find something better when I can, but the need to put something on every post is exhausting.
For most people your blog is really for you, and if anyone is reading it on the regular than bonus points... but the vast majority of the planet who runs a blog the traffic is very low.
So do with it as you wish, if you enjoy playing with AI and having it assist you with any part of it it's your corner of the net do with it as you absolutely wish and everyone else can kick rocks.
One of the reasons is that, most of the time, LLMs can't do graphics or write prose well enough either; otherwise it wouldn't reek of LLMs so much to people who put some effort to read it. Also, even poor writing or drawing can be elevated with some intentionality and personality, and using LLMs pretty much guarantees blandness.
> The problem comes when the imagery is placed as a false value signal. If it is designed to send a signal of "this content took a lot of effort to produce because an image that would be hard for a human to make is attached to it" - but the image was generated without that effort, then it's basically a lie and insult to the reader.
Well, the issue is the majority of AI images seems to fall into this category, which then trains my brain to treat all AI images in this way, rather than sifting for the few golden use cases where it's legitimately adding value.
At work, for example, I'm more likely to go brains off if someone presenting content shows an AI generated image in their slides.
No. Even setting ethical considerations aside, AI-generated art is lazy, looks gross, and signals poor taste whilst wasting computing resources. I think it's a perfectly reasonable principle to claim, especially if we're discussing diagrams. I'd much rather look at a low-effort hand or MS Paint drawing, there's more humanness in that than any generative AI turd.
You can call it superficial, but I’m not reading your AI blog, I’m not eating at your restaurant with AI food pictures, and I’m not listening to your AI music.
There is an artistry in assembling other art into a single cohesive piece. The film director doesn’t design the sets or give the performances or do the makeup, but they place an authorial stamp on the production by selecting what will and will not end up in the frame.
There is artistry in assembling other art into a single cohesive piece. A film is a collection of the work of artists and performers. Combining AI imagery and AI text together does not make art, because none of the constituent parts are art. A few prompts do not make art.
> There is an artistry in assembling other art into a single cohesive piece
I never said there wasn't, but I also wasn't talking about human roles where people in larger creative teams have some kind of artistic say in the final output of a much larger process involving other talented humans. That is a very different example and I think you know that.
But you didn't create anything if you used Photoshop... You didn't create anything if you used synth and autotune... You didn't do any scientific research if you used a calculator. You didn't do anything if you just piped together two programs.
I've heard it all before.
Gate keepers wanna keep the gate as long as they can.
You probably put a fair amount more effort and intention in than from just writing a text prompt, I'd wager. All of those examples would require you to at least have some kind of idea about your intended output.
These statements are factually untrue or overly broad to the extent of being nonsensical. Hopefully, you can see how that would come off as incredibly disingenuous. [E.g. what did they autotune? What did they Photoshop? Probably some creative work that they or somebody else made.]
[Edit: Further, these don't really line up with what the comment you're responding to is saying. If all you did was write a prompt for an image, it gives the impression that you may have done the same for the text. At that point, if I care about what the AI has to say, I can just write a prompt to an AI myself.]
I think they would obviously be happy with the alternative wording "it's about what was created" or just "it's about the product". I don't think they care about any aspect of how it came to exist.
Indeed, including some AI generated things is becoming a costly signal that you're not bound by the neoluddites and the online anti-AI mob / redditor hivemind. I'm starting to like this signal, but it has to be distinguished from the simply being-lazy signal that indicates the content may not be all that interesting of valued by the author. If you have an otherwise high quality site where you aren't afraid to use AI for some elements, that makes me like it more.
It's a start of a barber's pole of fashion. Like when it became desirable to wear torn jeans even if you can afford proper ones. But you can only safely do it if you won't be confused with an actual hobo. It signals not playing by midwit pearl clutcher rules. So same with AI use. Don't play to the pearl clutchers, but don't be a hobo either. Shower but have somewhat torn jeans.
Same problem for me for sending emails, outreach, and other behaviors that signal human identity but it turns out to be an AI post. The area with grace for me is how much effort a human spent on composing the message - I wouldn't expect a message a human wrote >50% of and had an AI help grammar check, proof read and edit need an AI disclosure. But otherwise, if the identity is >50% have an AI disclose it.
This is how I'd like for human-on-behalf-of-human outreach to work too, i.e. if my human secretary sends a message under my identity and via my email client, I'd expect it to be under their name not mine.
This points out some long standing issues with lack of accountability and deception by humans through our time. Think: humans have been doing these things:
- human have other humans impersonate them and send messages on their behalf (i.e. via secretary, receptionist, email, a VA, via social media via a social media manager)
- friends or family answering your letters if your a celebrity
Those behaviors, deceptive and lies, are insults to you at the expense of the gain of the liar. We haven't held them to accountability or a standard of respect before AI, and so we are facing the same challenges we did before AI - we just have more humans doing the same thing with AI as the <insert old human role here>. Why have we been unable to hold them accountable to the deception before - lack if transparency, lack of power to hold accountability to the behavior?
Some content creators are too focussed on their work that they might not have noticed the debate going on online about AI-generated images and all they wanted was a cool image for their content. They might not have known that they walked into a hornet's nest.... but they will find out soon enough. Should they have gone down the alternative route, where they spend time and money hiring someone to do it... who will probably use AI anyways. Telling someone not to use AI is like telling someone to not drive and instead take a horse and buggy (circa 1920).
There’s also a class of “detailed agent written technical blog” that’s you can just scan and get the shape that it’s long paragraphs, tables of statistics, and dry LLM writing. You notice the blog has one or more such posts a day.
It’s a turnoff immediately if someone shares what their agent wrote.
It also has happened a few times they contain a fair number of misrepresentations and mistakes.
On the other hand, it could be great to have collapsed sections clearly marked as LLM with the name of the model, the prompt, the assumption the author somewhat checked it and didn't use it to write the article.
You can put it inline or at the end of the article: references, citations, further reading, "AI".
(It might also be the only way to stop training models on their own output)
Are you speaking in the abstract, or would you, personally, like that when reading a blog?
Speaking for myself, I have absolutely no interest in reading anything written by an LLM that I didn't prompt myself, under really any circumstances I can think of.
It's a turn off both because you don't know if it's accurate at all, and because LLMs have a way of turning 1 sentence ideas into pages of diluted slop.
I’m inclined to agree, but not as much because the image was generated with AI but rather because it’s rare for such images to exhibit taste. They feel like the visual equivalent of gilded twinkies, which is offputting.
Selecting a stock image doesn’t have this effect, even if it’s not related to the post. Even the most unremarkable stock image has the fingerprints of its artist, and the choice itself can reveal things about the author. They don’t have that hyper-polished unintentioniality and subtle uncanny hollow “wrongness” that generated images do.
AI-generated images discourage me from interacting with any entity AT ALL. Bar / restaurant posters, events, shops, anything. Because it makes the brand appear lazy. And in a weird way "anti-human". I don't have a better word than that.
Yesterday I encountered AI-generated food photos on a menu for the first time. I immediately felt grossed out before even realising why. Their generated focaccias didn't even look like food, just off-putting trypophobia triggers.
I think it is like CGI in movies, in the beginning it was often obvious and jarring. Over time as it gets better the obviousness of AI images will be much harder to spot and they will be common without being noteworthy.
It's the complete opposite of that. I prefer human things, human interaction, with human beings involved, which in some way reflect the human experience.
This is kind of like saying in the 2000s "If you won't listen to auto-tuned music, you're in for a lonely life." There's entire subcultures where you can avoid that, for example, fans of the Grateful Dead (who include many successful people, such as Jerome Powell, but that's another story). Anyway, they don't tend to be lonely people.
This hasn’t been my wife’s experience at all. She manually writes all her content, but uses AI images as sizzlers for the scenes (fan fic for popular shows). Short of getting the actors together for a million bucks, she’d be hard pressed to make these scenes a reality. It’s also supposed to be aspirational, like “what if the tv cast got back together for another season hey?” I think the average person just doesn’t really notice.
She’s had to figure out where the line is though. She tried using ElevenLabs to dictate her scripts, thinking it’d make things more convenient for her fans, and that lost her subscribers because they seemingly disliked the more obvious use of AI.
Not all of us can afford to hire illustrators for every blog entry, and while an MS Paint squiggle might suit this blog's author's tastes, I can sympathize with anyone who might prefer something more sophisticated.
I don't see what the problem is with AI images, if some thought has been put into the image itself and if it's relevant in some way. I'd far rather see something playful and on-topic than the generic stock images littering blogs previously or some random example of the writer's photography with little connection to the article.
But really, whatever I like or don't like is besides the point. The blog using AI images isn't my blog. And if I was one of the blog authors who've sent this author into full prig-mode, I'd say to him, "No worries, Nelson. Have a happy life." I'd wager the blog author's own life wouldn't be any happier for bowing to the sensibilities of the Nelsons of this world.
I just sat through my first fully AI-generated presentation. The content was as bland and straight down the middle as possible. The slides were all generated by a standard design - a mix of text blocks, bullets, fonts, colors.
The whole thing was packed with information and completely worthless. I’m 100% convinced that before too long we’re all going to be allergic to this low effort crap, and craving actual people with an actual point of view.
Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people it's wasting people's time and disrespectful. If you couldn't otherwise write it yourself for whatever reason it's best not to until you can.
>Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people
For me it's a reverse filter, the people I see doing the shaming, those the loudest most seemingly unhinged anti-AI folks - they get blocked / ignored and looked at as if they were the equiv of PETA activists.
Yes, I avoided using it for the longest but the voices that end up pushing me away these days are the antis who gatekeep like crazy, say other people are lazy, decry anything they don't like as "slop" etc. One side is moving forward and I'm sure they'll figure out the right mix over time. The group that just denigrates other people, I wonder how they will cope over the next few years.
>Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach
That's a wild stance. If you don't like what someone else made - AI assisted or not - you can just move on and not purposefully set out to publicly ruin them...
People already tried to cancel others because they didn't agree with them. Eventually the most of people came to a conclusion that it is no good. I think at least that the most did just that. So I'm proposing another solution, just ignore what you don't like. No one is forcing you to read a blog that uses AI generated images or uses a wrong color for its background.
To cancel someone was really popular for a couple years starting just after covid. There's probably a better definition somewhere, but basically it is when a collective of like-minded people decide to publicly shame a person until they are too embarrassed to have an online presence, or even worse, until companies are pressured to not employ the person. It was like unofficial unions against someone existing. It stopped after enough people were cancelled that they were no longer powerless together. Then people who hate others had to evolve into different ways to be disrespectful because this method stopped working, which is why you don't see cancelling anymore
Finally. Same effect with stock imagery. I like using a creative imagery. Hacky looking tuis like sl or pipes.sh. They have some eyecandy and make my blogs have a uniform style.
Same, I tend to assume it is a sign that AI is used across the board.
But please keep it coming. I need to spend less time idly browsing and the growing preponderance of AI is helping push me in the direction I want to go. My time spent on “social media” has dropped significantly over recent months.
“AI-generated images discourage me from reading” is a statement that’s true for me too, albeit for different reasons than offered in this post. For me, it’s the same kind of thing as “reading the text of your slides out loud”, or repeating the contention in both the introduction and conclusion.
The point of repetition is to reinforce understanding by approaching the same place from different directions, so the reader can pin down your idea at the intersection of these various thrusts. Multiple arrows from roughly the same place going in roughly the same direction don’t constrain the expressed idea, instead they just make it fuzzier.
This is not surprising. Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot. Humans assign quality relative to themselves.
A chess game between to bots is boring, no matter how strong the bots are. Humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
I dunno which I’d rather have, but I do know the only kind I’ve ever bought is the factory-made kind. So if the aim is appealing to a wide audience, you’re arguing involving robots in the production process is key?
> Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot.
The latter, of course, which is why that's what I own. Aside from that, this is an absurd and grossly dishonest analogy -- that's not at all the choice here.
Some of the most fascinating games are between Stockfish and Leela. People who don't know this know nothing about chess.
Some of the most stupid things I have ever read are from those suffering from radical anti-AI hysteria, and it is becoming a primary means by which I judge people's intelligence. ("radical" is a key word here -- there are numerous legitimate reasons to be critical of numerous aspects of the AI boom.)
So much this, blogs add an image for the sake of having an image. At this point it would be much better to just have a random dog or a cat pic, it is as relevant to your blog post as your random generated thing, but I'd prefer seeing a random happy pup.
And if you generated a pic I suppose you also generated your post, so I'm way less likely to pay attention to it.
Part of the problem is many bloggers think an image is required for every post. This is reinforced by algorithms which favor such posts, and drives bloggers to the easiest/fastest sources of free images.
The "featured image" in Wordpress is what gets shown on the index page, in shared social posts, and other contexts. And certainly, the algorithms favor such posts over pure text posts, even if the text content in the spartan post is far better.
There are other factors at play, too. Many bloggers are lazy, some are severely time constrained, a few are fearful of legal repercussions associated with copying images off the Internet, and a majority are creatively or technically incapable of making their own images to include on a personal blog post.
"I’d rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image."
Interesting because I'm seeing tons of YouTube channels using AI generated stick figure animations with AI voice overlays to trick people into thinking it's not AI generated.
The same goes for your business. Your AI “art” isn’t eye catching, at first glance it’s lazy. A longer glance it’s unsettling. We’re heading for a really boring period in graphic design.
either way, looks like we're staring down the barrel of mediocrity - the AI isn't a fix. You can't really AI yourself outside of 'the average x/y/z' that these models generate. being specific with your prompting still leads to the most average version of said prompt...rinse repeat.
This seems temporary. AI generated images will become the norm for many applications. Today we wonder whether a model in an advertisement is real or generated, 5 years from know this wont even be an interesting thing to consider.
In many contexts, images are meant to illustrate a point. The human becomes the gatekeeper of generated content. The question becomes: does this picture illustrate the point I want to make. If so, you are adding your human approved stamp to the genrated output.
I'd rather read a blog post that includes relevant and decently made illustrations of the topic at hand (explanatory graphics etc) rather than just a wall of text. Makes no difference if these are drawn by hand or using X software or an LLM. But that's just me.
I think AI images can enhance a blog article as long as the reader is fully aware and trusting that it's just the auxiliary material to the blog has been generated, not the main body of value.
This has been a frequent problem on fiction writing on royal road. Author promises that they don't use AI to write and then proceed to use AI to generate the cover for the series. They might be telling the truth, but I am not going to spend the time to figure it out for myself. They are really shooting themselves in the foot. A shitty MS paint cover would be less off putting.
Is this about technical blogs where the image is either of technical nature or something else?
I'd think in the former case it doesn't matter and it's mostly the text I care about to be interesting and personal. I don't read non technical blogs so I don't know what if ai images are a turnoff.
I have the same reaction with AI generated YouTube thumbnails. Something in the back of my mind immediately goes "it's probably low quality content" and I'm less likely to click.
I don't think the internet as we know it is going to survive generative AI.
Before, the simple existence of the content of some basic level of quality was a strong signal of effort, which corresponds strongly to value. If it's there, it's worth reading.
Now, the existence of content of a basic level of quality signals nothing. It might have some value, but it's much more likely it's useless AI slop.
This principle -- if it's there it's probably worth taking a look at -- undergirded so much of system of creation, discovery, and sharing that made the internet special -- blogs, open-source, posts, comments.
It allowed the gatekeepers, middlemen, guided channels, and tolls to be removed from the creation, enjoyment, sharing, and consumption of content.
I'm worried we're going to have to go back, just to get away from the avalanche of crap people are using AI to produce at crazy rate.
100%. if I see AI slop images or videos I just click off, it's become almost automatic for me now.
I'm not gonna spend my mental bandwidth on figuring out if the thing is worth reading/whatever and that somehow the author just didn't realize that it's a net negative
Agree but how many times are the same articles and opinions reaching the top. It feels like we’re in a loop and it’s boring me out reading the same thing over and over and over again.
There is negative value in wasting vertical space to put an irrelevant prompt output in an article. It makes me question the sanity of whoever is doing this stuff. Doubly so if they actually think they dumped a bunch of AI-generated text on the internet just for people to AI-summarize it. Like... what are they DOING?
I find images are good for speed-reading; they convey information that otherwise would require much more time-consuming attention. I'm significantly more likely to read a long article, after skimming it, if it contains contextual images.
Personally, I'm okay with AI generated images as long as it's not obvious or slop: For me, a carefully-prompted image is on par with a carefully chosen photo, carefully chosen diagram, ect.
I also hold blog entries to a lower standard than professional content: I'm much more likely (after skimming) to read an imperfect non-professional blog entry than (after skimming) imperfect professional content. (And professional content is where I expect images that are higher quality than AI prompting.)
Weirdly I might slightly prefer your AI-generated image if some thought is put into it to entirely average soulless and tasteless corporate stock photo. You know multicultural team or photogenic enough person doing some meaningless staged task. Those have no chance to adding anything to the text. Same really goes for clip art.
At least with AI there might be some thought or idea behind it. Even it is lazy slop.
what percentage of readers does it bother though? If 2% of readers just refuse anything built/generated with AI then are they worth accommodating? It sounds crazy but i distinctly remember people slamming their fist on the desk saying they will always prefer to use the card catalog at the library instead of Google when search was really taking off. At some point you just have to move on.
I think there's a difference here between low-effort AI slop and something made with the help of AI. I always wonder how many AI images and articles we consume without realizing they were made by AI just because a human actually spent the time on making the AI create a good output.
This is more my problem with it. Obvious AI usage tends to be slop content, so any sign of it becomes a useful heuristic as to whether the subject is useless spam/slop. But I'm not anti-AI. It's a category of tools that can be useful. I think using AI as part of the editing process can be very useful. Unfortunately it also enabled more spam. And if it looks like spam, I'll instinctively treat it as such.
If you're writing about something which exists in reality, then it is possible to take a photo of it. If you're writing about something which doesn't exist in reality, then it shouldn't be accompanied by any image.
Stock photos or AI generated images are always wrong. Real photos, no matter how bland, convey information from reality and are always right.
The main problem is, those AI generated images are only so jarring because they're so obvious.
As time goes on they'll be harder to spot. We're going to need a new way of determining quality as such obvious signals have a limited shelf-life.
Not that AI generated images are always bad. They are perfectly acceptable if used for (not an exclusive list): small separators between sections in large blog posts, or other decorative features; used to illustrate things for which no real image exists (as long as it's labelled as an impression/reconstruction/etc.). They're only really a negative signal if they're used dishonestly, to claim something existed when it didn't, etc.
If a content is making a positive impact on your life, your mental health, your family's well being, your general outlook, your future, would it matter if is from AI or from human?
> If it is making a positive impact, would it matter if it's AI or human
We're drowning in this stuff, and no one has enough hours in their day to find out if obviously AI-generated slop can make a positive impact on their life. Why don't you read it and let us know? We'll continue to not engage with it.
Eh. I tend to use stock photo stuff. Even easier than AI (and most stockhouses are now using AI, themselves). If it's important to the story, I'll generally generate it, myself (I tend to use OmniGraffle a lot). I'm quite capable of making my own images.
The biggest thing, for me, is provenance. I sometimes get amazed at how people just grab any image they want, and slap it into their blog. There's a whole class of scammer, that goes around spamming fake "we're gonna sue you" letters to sites (I have gotten them, for images that I know are completely clear of obligation). If the image really was ripped off, then they won't be scammers, sending the emails.
I'd rather someone use an AI-generated image; especially if it's just "window dressing," than they put themselves into legal jeopardy, by pirating images.
My my knee jerk reaction is to agree, I really hate the obvious looking AI images, though I suspect ultimately it comes down to having good taste.
As much as I like to be on the anti AI bandwagon, for which there are plenty of good reasons. Some people use the tool (like any tool) well, to compliment their work.
Eg. this author uses great images to accompany their articles (except for one which is obviously AI), its hard to know if they are real or not but they support the text. https://tuhat.net/@jesusrrodriguez/
Regarding businesses, I think the use of bland stock images made most corporate sites awful years ago. AI is just accelerating and making it easier for the rest of us to create the lazy heartless "content" that has been so common from the corporate world.
Would photography discourage OP from reading a blog? Should I hand-paint my imagery? If I am the type of person that would use a camera, then maybe I'd be the type of person to hire a ghostwriter.
What about stock photography, IMO as much as I personally hate "overcooked" AI-generated imagery, it doesn't annoy me that much more than stock photography does on blogs.
I do however use it as a gauge of "if the images are generated by AI, how much of the text content is?" though, so...
Yes, stock photography is also lame, but at least their creators gave permission. It's my dream that "AI" is going to make us look back and reconsider some of the pre-era slop we've accepted in the name of convenience. I doubt it, though.
People hate the false effort signaling. Photos require effort and skill to take, and while it's perhaps less than an oil painting, it's still something.
If you push AI-generated content to make stuff look fancy, it's a bad idea. If you generate stuff to communicate more clearly, I don't see a problem.
Have you seen the trashpile that is instagram (even pre-AI)? Ansel Adams made art, most people make garbage, there's a reason "clanker slop" performs well on socials. If that makes you angry I suggest taking up meditation because that's more likely to lead to a resolution than crying on the internet.
Serious question: are you having a particularly bad day or week? Because this was really rude and you appear to have poured out a lot more irritation than was merited.
If it were not for this, as a geeky photographer I'd get into it with you about whether Ansel Adams was really an artist, whether he's any particular benchmark or high water mark for photography, and whether individual creations are any less artistic than what he did.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I crash your anti-AI pity party to try and get you to at least be logically consistent human beings? That must be pretty threatening.
You seem significantly more aggrieved than me here.
> most people make garbage,
That's fine, that's what sets truly great art apart. Not that it terribly matters, more care and ingenuity goes into even some shit instagram thirst trap picture than every clanker slop ever output combined.
These are lifeless things. Their only value is by referencing human creation which they debase with their very existence.
Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process.
Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.
I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made with AI as slop is any different from people rejecting photographs because they were made with chemicals and lenses.
In 100 years the same article will be written about AI art, and will probably feature the phrase “clanker slop”.
If you use images on your blog, even if you are scrupulous about sourcing them, purchase licenses, or go by the same low-resolution "fair use" rules that Wikipedia does, you will get several letters a year from law firms claiming they represent a client who owns the right to that photo.
Rather than wasting time sorting all these out when the images are there mostly to break up a wall of text, some blogs simply use a few AI images. This way if those letters come, they can simply put them in the bin.
I don’t have a problem with ai generated media in blogs at all. Nobody is going to take the time to hand draw a piece of art for a blog that takes them less than an hour to write. Pictures speak a thousand words and serve as a great intro to a blog post. Embrace the future.
Hurray for an intelligent comment. It's alarming how much idiocy results from this radical anti-AI hysteria. e.g., someone here said that a set of slides "packed with information" was "completely worthless" because it lacked "an actual point of view" from "actual people".
As someone who adds AI generated images on blog entries, I just do not give a shit if some people have opinions like this. Jog on?
The vast majority of bloggers in 2026 do so for their own edification, to their own preferences and choices. Whining about what they do is decided a beggars being choosers thing.
For me the breaking point for images in texts was stock photos.
Before that, when there was a photo in the article it was a frame from a footage from the event or the photo, or the schematic of the device the article was about or something. Something relevant to that particular piece of information.
But then everything became click-bait factory illustrated by images that fit the mood.
AI images don't make it worse. Don't make it better. But they might if they get better at relevant infographics. For now they aren't good enough because they rely on a human for understanding of what are they to depic and humans often don't care enough.
There is no "before that", not on the internet. Stock photography as a business is more than a century old, and we were using it on the internet as soon as you could put an IMG tag in a page.
I find them very interesting and they make me more likely to remember your blog. I was reading that Gas Town post yesterday and despite all the backlash about the whimsical world and the ai images being sloppy and wrong, they still stuck in my brain more than anything else I’ve read this year.
The author say they’d prefer Microsoft paint images but actually I don’t think this is true of most audiences. People have the ability to make terrible paint images for decades and they’ve never caught anyone’s attention in a positive way, it’s not going to start now.
OP’s blog of white text on black background will be forgotten quickly. If I visit it again, I will have no recollection of ever having visited. I’m not saying they need to use AI, but to oppose AI with the opposite —- minimal design or even intentionally crappy design — will not have the intended effect of communicating “this is quality human-authored content”, it will just be forgettable.
On the other hand, plenty of art can lean into being intentionally brash and be all the more memorable for it. The phrase "bad MS paint blog" immediately makes me think of Hyperbole and a Half[1] where the style feeds into the zany ADHD vibe of the blog.
Often, you find ugliness and rule breaking as a backlash to an overly polished status quo. AM radio rock gave way to punk, hair metal gave way to grunge, and EDM gave way to hyperpop. The most iconic album cover of 2024 was the word "brat" badly rendered on a plain, garish background.[2]
(Then again I was like 15 when this appealed to me…)
If the blog is otherwise not about being amusing or edgy, then the MS Paint is going to send a different vibe. In your examples the paint sets the vibe, which I think is what they were going for.
> People have the ability to make terrible paint images for decades and they’ve never caught anyone’s attention in a positive way
Citation needed for this one. It could be because people don't do it very much? I think a very good piece of writing coupled with a crappy but intentional MS Paint piece could be very attention catching and memorable.
> OP’s blog of white text on black background will be forgotten quickly.
I actually get annoyed with the tech crowd always complaining at seemingly the slightest bit of flair or fun added to any blog. To each their own, of course. I've seen some really slick minimal blogs but I do like it when layouts gets creative--gawdy, even!--, so long as I can read the text. And you can always use reader mode.
> I know there are 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.
So it is OK for you to use AI generation tools like Claude Code and likely using it in your blog or using it to generate code, but it isn't OK for you to see someone else using AI to generate images?
With the above already stated, that means the author cannot guarantee that not a single use of AI was used in their blog at all given that we know they use Claude.
Why preach fake principles with virtue signalling and then break your own standards in your own blog post?
"I’d rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image."
The problem is, there are also AI generated MS Paint drawings that you can't tell is AI. We are only noticing the AI images that are in an 'AI' style. The AI tools allow you to make images you can't tell is AI.
> I'd rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image.
So spot on!
And, with that Paint drawing, it'll probably illustrate what you mean and at the same time we establish some kind of trust; I'll know this is not just mere AI slop.
I need everything to be 100% ORIGINAL and AUTHENTIC.
AI Generation is obviously slop: unforgivable and death-sentence worthy.
Stock photo? Please, I NEED YOU TO TAKE A PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN COURSE FOR YOUR BLOG.
Go to art school or else I won't even consider looking at your website.
What I read , my western ego is so big I want to place my opinion everywhere possible .
Image is content , ai can generate art level images and an obvious slop . To read or or not is absolutely up to reader , not someone’s entitled opinion .
To me there are different motivations to include imagery and some of them are just fine with AI generation. If the imagery actually goes to the substance of helping to illustrate or explain the actual content then it seems very superficial to reject it based on how it was generated. In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way.
The problem comes when the imagery is placed as a false value signal. If it is designed to send a signal of "this content took a lot of effort to produce because an image that would be hard for a human to make is attached to it" - but the image was generated without that effort, then it's basically a lie and insult to the reader.
It's like styrofoam stucco on the ceiling.
Decoration and ornament have served always to signal extra effort that went into something, signaling that it is considered important and valued by the maker/owner. But people also have incentive to do cheaper mimicry. And then the viewers have incentive to distinguish real from fake to see where true, scarce effort went. These dynamics are crucial for understanding the feelings and emotions around AI. Value is almost never in the thing itself or some inherent quality but in the social signals and relationships. (somewhat less true in very utilitarian engineering machinery or for sustenance level basic necessities).
In a blog, real images signify you spent a lot of time creating the post, it was very important to you, and you likely made sure the details in the text were accurate.
While AI images in a blog signify low effort high volume posting where the text likely was just copied from AI without any care.
The article author should have specified more closely which type of image. Stock image sites had already made generic photos and drawings cheap to include. And indeed they look cheap. The more airbrushed and high quality the cheaper it looks. If a dentist website has cheap beautiful stock nurse photos, it's less valued than real photos taken by a photographer at their location.
I don't think it signifies any of those things. This is all new stuff. Some people have decided to offload image-creation to machines because what they care about is the text.
This stuff you say it signifies, it says more about you than them.
It's about experience visiting many sites and spotting a correlation. There is a very bottom of slop, the equivalent of the chumbox from earlier. But on the higher end it may be more like you say. If there are other indicators of quality, I wouldn't penalize it for AI use. It's like having lots of piercings and torn clothes. You may be a genius scholar who is kinda into this as a hobby or you may be an actual lowlife who can't hold down a job and gets into trouble with the law all the time.
People will always make snap judgments, you can't inspect every website in detail. So if you use AI, make sure there are some other signals of quality.
If you don't care about the images then don't have images.
That is one use.
Images (incl. icons) can also be there to structure text and provide visual clues on what is where.
>In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way.
Communicating low effort used to be insulting to the consumer, yet now I'm expected to praise it? I understand that we're not talking about monetary exchange, but we're still talking about my finite time in this world, time that I could've been invest reading or looking at something else.
So we're going back to my favorite adage these days: If you cannot spend time writing it, I refuse to spend time reading it.
In fact, the moment I realize someone's content is AI generated, I just feed the links (youtube -> transcript, blog posts -> link) to chatGPT and have it generate a summary. That's because if you're in favor of using your time efficiently then so am I.
Should everyone draw their icons by hand, too?
Clipart exists, free use art exists, the Gimp Green Pepper stamp tool exists. I would read a blog with extensive pepper stamp art before something with over the top hacker aesthetic AI generated slop art.
So what about the use of the odd AI generated icon, not some extensive use?
Gotta use the green pepper stamp tool for bullet points. /s
Little icons would be less noticeable at least.
The only reason most of my blog posts have an image at all is because social media seems to want some type of thumbnail image to go with the post. If I don't have something, many of them seem to just grab my logo instead which seems...spammier.
I try to find something better when I can, but the need to put something on every post is exhausting.
This. If it's actually an illustrative part of the text, include it, even if it's AI generated. Not everyone who can write can do graphics.
If it's only decoration, leave it out. No matter whether AI, stock or custom made.
For most people your blog is really for you, and if anyone is reading it on the regular than bonus points... but the vast majority of the planet who runs a blog the traffic is very low.
So do with it as you wish, if you enjoy playing with AI and having it assist you with any part of it it's your corner of the net do with it as you absolutely wish and everyone else can kick rocks.
not everyone who can think and solve interesting problems can write prose well, but there's still a lot of complaining about AI-generated text.
One of the reasons is that, most of the time, LLMs can't do graphics or write prose well enough either; otherwise it wouldn't reek of LLMs so much to people who put some effort to read it. Also, even poor writing or drawing can be elevated with some intentionality and personality, and using LLMs pretty much guarantees blandness.
True until LLMs become smarter than humans. At that point, you __want__ the AI generated image.
> The problem comes when the imagery is placed as a false value signal. If it is designed to send a signal of "this content took a lot of effort to produce because an image that would be hard for a human to make is attached to it" - but the image was generated without that effort, then it's basically a lie and insult to the reader.
Well, the issue is the majority of AI images seems to fall into this category, which then trains my brain to treat all AI images in this way, rather than sifting for the few golden use cases where it's legitimately adding value.
At work, for example, I'm more likely to go brains off if someone presenting content shows an AI generated image in their slides.
No. Even setting ethical considerations aside, AI-generated art is lazy, looks gross, and signals poor taste whilst wasting computing resources. I think it's a perfectly reasonable principle to claim, especially if we're discussing diagrams. I'd much rather look at a low-effort hand or MS Paint drawing, there's more humanness in that than any generative AI turd.
You can call it superficial, but I’m not reading your AI blog, I’m not eating at your restaurant with AI food pictures, and I’m not listening to your AI music.
I’m quite happy without all the slop.
For every AI snob that's not reading an article because they see an AI image, there's 10 non-snobs who appreciate a decent usage.
If you're creating complete slop, no one is reading your article in the first place. Full stop. The image doesn't matter.
As with anything, it's about what you created, and creating at all - not the tool you used to create.
The snobs and haters will continue to b!tch and moan. They always have. Always will. Your two cent elitist opinions are still only worth two cents.
> it's about what you created
But you didn't create anything in this case. Not the images at least. Which then casts doubt on the rest of the writing in said blog post.
There is an artistry in assembling other art into a single cohesive piece. The film director doesn’t design the sets or give the performances or do the makeup, but they place an authorial stamp on the production by selecting what will and will not end up in the frame.
There is artistry in assembling other art into a single cohesive piece. A film is a collection of the work of artists and performers. Combining AI imagery and AI text together does not make art, because none of the constituent parts are art. A few prompts do not make art.
Writing a blog post is a creative effort, selecting a few pieces (generated or not) is creative, too, whether it is up to your standards are not.
The gatekeeping on this is crazy. I really wonder how artists discussed photography and other advances.
> There is an artistry in assembling other art into a single cohesive piece
I never said there wasn't, but I also wasn't talking about human roles where people in larger creative teams have some kind of artistic say in the final output of a much larger process involving other talented humans. That is a very different example and I think you know that.
Oh yeah I can just remember all those famous renowned collages that everyone associates as art.
A director does a hell of a lot more than select what goes in a frame and then sit back and watch it come together.
A collage made by Picasso is not associated as art?
But you didn't create anything if you used Photoshop... You didn't create anything if you used synth and autotune... You didn't do any scientific research if you used a calculator. You didn't do anything if you just piped together two programs.
I've heard it all before.
Gate keepers wanna keep the gate as long as they can.
Don't forget photography. Photography is going to destroy art, don't you know.
You probably put a fair amount more effort and intention in than from just writing a text prompt, I'd wager. All of those examples would require you to at least have some kind of idea about your intended output.
These statements are factually untrue or overly broad to the extent of being nonsensical. Hopefully, you can see how that would come off as incredibly disingenuous. [E.g. what did they autotune? What did they Photoshop? Probably some creative work that they or somebody else made.]
[Edit: Further, these don't really line up with what the comment you're responding to is saying. If all you did was write a prompt for an image, it gives the impression that you may have done the same for the text. At that point, if I care about what the AI has to say, I can just write a prompt to an AI myself.]
Getting an AI to create the imagine you want isn't necessarily easy.
I think they would obviously be happy with the alternative wording "it's about what was created" or just "it's about the product". I don't think they care about any aspect of how it came to exist.
Hmm, I wonder why you're taking this so personally...
Indeed, including some AI generated things is becoming a costly signal that you're not bound by the neoluddites and the online anti-AI mob / redditor hivemind. I'm starting to like this signal, but it has to be distinguished from the simply being-lazy signal that indicates the content may not be all that interesting of valued by the author. If you have an otherwise high quality site where you aren't afraid to use AI for some elements, that makes me like it more.
It's a start of a barber's pole of fashion. Like when it became desirable to wear torn jeans even if you can afford proper ones. But you can only safely do it if you won't be confused with an actual hobo. It signals not playing by midwit pearl clutcher rules. So same with AI use. Don't play to the pearl clutchers, but don't be a hobo either. Shower but have somewhat torn jeans.
People have heuristics. My heuristics is that AI slop in images -> slop in the text, whether AI or not.
It will be wrong sometimes, but mostly it's not. OP has a point.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is a hater and a snob.”
Come on. We all know what kind of images this post is talking about. No need to play dumb.
Same problem for me for sending emails, outreach, and other behaviors that signal human identity but it turns out to be an AI post. The area with grace for me is how much effort a human spent on composing the message - I wouldn't expect a message a human wrote >50% of and had an AI help grammar check, proof read and edit need an AI disclosure. But otherwise, if the identity is >50% have an AI disclose it.
This is how I'd like for human-on-behalf-of-human outreach to work too, i.e. if my human secretary sends a message under my identity and via my email client, I'd expect it to be under their name not mine.
This points out some long standing issues with lack of accountability and deception by humans through our time. Think: humans have been doing these things:
- human have other humans impersonate them and send messages on their behalf (i.e. via secretary, receptionist, email, a VA, via social media via a social media manager)
- friends or family answering your letters if your a celebrity
Those behaviors, deceptive and lies, are insults to you at the expense of the gain of the liar. We haven't held them to accountability or a standard of respect before AI, and so we are facing the same challenges we did before AI - we just have more humans doing the same thing with AI as the <insert old human role here>. Why have we been unable to hold them accountable to the deception before - lack if transparency, lack of power to hold accountability to the behavior?
Some content creators are too focussed on their work that they might not have noticed the debate going on online about AI-generated images and all they wanted was a cool image for their content. They might not have known that they walked into a hornet's nest.... but they will find out soon enough. Should they have gone down the alternative route, where they spend time and money hiring someone to do it... who will probably use AI anyways. Telling someone not to use AI is like telling someone to not drive and instead take a horse and buggy (circa 1920).
There’s also a class of “detailed agent written technical blog” that’s you can just scan and get the shape that it’s long paragraphs, tables of statistics, and dry LLM writing. You notice the blog has one or more such posts a day.
It’s a turnoff immediately if someone shares what their agent wrote.
It also has happened a few times they contain a fair number of misrepresentations and mistakes.
On the other hand, it could be great to have collapsed sections clearly marked as LLM with the name of the model, the prompt, the assumption the author somewhat checked it and didn't use it to write the article.
You can put it inline or at the end of the article: references, citations, further reading, "AI".
(It might also be the only way to stop training models on their own output)
Are you speaking in the abstract, or would you, personally, like that when reading a blog?
Speaking for myself, I have absolutely no interest in reading anything written by an LLM that I didn't prompt myself, under really any circumstances I can think of.
You are thinking of something nice to have. At least half the idea here is that it would be nice not to have something.
Usually there are many buttons and links one wouldn't click on.
If authors can't resist having chunks of copy paste slop in the middle of their article they can do it in a way I don't have to see it.
They also get a fair opportunity to impress me with a prompt that looks interesting enough.
And they get to distance themselves from the idea that copying [say] a Wikipedia article into a blog posting is the same as writing something.
It's a turn off both because you don't know if it's accurate at all, and because LLMs have a way of turning 1 sentence ideas into pages of diluted slop.
I’m inclined to agree, but not as much because the image was generated with AI but rather because it’s rare for such images to exhibit taste. They feel like the visual equivalent of gilded twinkies, which is offputting.
Selecting a stock image doesn’t have this effect, even if it’s not related to the post. Even the most unremarkable stock image has the fingerprints of its artist, and the choice itself can reveal things about the author. They don’t have that hyper-polished unintentioniality and subtle uncanny hollow “wrongness” that generated images do.
AI-generated images discourage me from interacting with any entity AT ALL. Bar / restaurant posters, events, shops, anything. Because it makes the brand appear lazy. And in a weird way "anti-human". I don't have a better word than that.
Yesterday I encountered AI-generated food photos on a menu for the first time. I immediately felt grossed out before even realising why. Their generated focaccias didn't even look like food, just off-putting trypophobia triggers.
100%. Uncanny valley but for food. Or anything else.
You're setting yourself up for a lonely life.
I think it is like CGI in movies, in the beginning it was often obvious and jarring. Over time as it gets better the obviousness of AI images will be much harder to spot and they will be common without being noteworthy.
> You're setting yourself up for a lonely life.
What a ridiculous conclusion jump.
It's the complete opposite of that. I prefer human things, human interaction, with human beings involved, which in some way reflect the human experience.
> lonely life.
Maybe they are hoping robots will replace human interaction, connection and intimacy like in some of those future distopian movies
I want to say /s but I'm sure lots of people are looking forward to this because they are already lonely
look how miserable your AI technology has made you!
look at me. i'm happy! >:(
This is kind of like saying in the 2000s "If you won't listen to auto-tuned music, you're in for a lonely life." There's entire subcultures where you can avoid that, for example, fans of the Grateful Dead (who include many successful people, such as Jerome Powell, but that's another story). Anyway, they don't tend to be lonely people.
Somehow we managed to live this whole time without generative AI. Why do we need it now?
"Just eat the shit, everyone is eating the shit, eat the shit with us or you'll be a lonely weirdo"
hm, ok
This hasn’t been my wife’s experience at all. She manually writes all her content, but uses AI images as sizzlers for the scenes (fan fic for popular shows). Short of getting the actors together for a million bucks, she’d be hard pressed to make these scenes a reality. It’s also supposed to be aspirational, like “what if the tv cast got back together for another season hey?” I think the average person just doesn’t really notice.
She’s had to figure out where the line is though. She tried using ElevenLabs to dictate her scripts, thinking it’d make things more convenient for her fans, and that lost her subscribers because they seemingly disliked the more obvious use of AI.
> I think the average person just doesn’t really notice.
Yes, this is what's insulting about it, the assumption that it won't be noticed.
People also confuse “didn’t notice” with “didn’t confront me about”.
People noticed, they just didn’t want cause a conflict over it.
AI generic blogspam "art" - as off-putting or worse than clipart or those weird flat characters that took over everything "corporate" a few years ago.
Actually using AI to make a shitpost image relevant to the text? Amusing, fun, worthwhile.
The bendy arm people
https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/
Not all of us can afford to hire illustrators for every blog entry, and while an MS Paint squiggle might suit this blog's author's tastes, I can sympathize with anyone who might prefer something more sophisticated.
I don't see what the problem is with AI images, if some thought has been put into the image itself and if it's relevant in some way. I'd far rather see something playful and on-topic than the generic stock images littering blogs previously or some random example of the writer's photography with little connection to the article.
But really, whatever I like or don't like is besides the point. The blog using AI images isn't my blog. And if I was one of the blog authors who've sent this author into full prig-mode, I'd say to him, "No worries, Nelson. Have a happy life." I'd wager the blog author's own life wouldn't be any happier for bowing to the sensibilities of the Nelsons of this world.
AI images are not more sophisticated, they are less sophisticated
I just sat through my first fully AI-generated presentation. The content was as bland and straight down the middle as possible. The slides were all generated by a standard design - a mix of text blocks, bullets, fonts, colors.
The whole thing was packed with information and completely worthless. I’m 100% convinced that before too long we’re all going to be allergic to this low effort crap, and craving actual people with an actual point of view.
this is what I've observed as well, it's supposedly impressive and packed with "information" and .. stuff but it's just kind of noise to me
it's fatiguing to read that stuff as well
Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people it's wasting people's time and disrespectful. If you couldn't otherwise write it yourself for whatever reason it's best not to until you can.
>Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people
For me it's a reverse filter, the people I see doing the shaming, those the loudest most seemingly unhinged anti-AI folks - they get blocked / ignored and looked at as if they were the equiv of PETA activists.
Yes, I avoided using it for the longest but the voices that end up pushing me away these days are the antis who gatekeep like crazy, say other people are lazy, decry anything they don't like as "slop" etc. One side is moving forward and I'm sure they'll figure out the right mix over time. The group that just denigrates other people, I wonder how they will cope over the next few years.
>Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach
That's a wild stance. If you don't like what someone else made - AI assisted or not - you can just move on and not purposefully set out to publicly ruin them...
It's good as a community to communicate what we prefer to read. At least that way the author knows why they're getting the cold shoulder.
> Public shaming...
People already tried to cancel others because they didn't agree with them. Eventually the most of people came to a conclusion that it is no good. I think at least that the most did just that. So I'm proposing another solution, just ignore what you don't like. No one is forcing you to read a blog that uses AI generated images or uses a wrong color for its background.
I don't know what you really mean by "cancelling", but I think it's totally fine (and even good) to talk about the flaws in stuff.
To cancel someone was really popular for a couple years starting just after covid. There's probably a better definition somewhere, but basically it is when a collective of like-minded people decide to publicly shame a person until they are too embarrassed to have an online presence, or even worse, until companies are pressured to not employ the person. It was like unofficial unions against someone existing. It stopped after enough people were cancelled that they were no longer powerless together. Then people who hate others had to evolve into different ways to be disrespectful because this method stopped working, which is why you don't see cancelling anymore
> I don't know what you really mean by "cancelling"
It surprises me, that you don't know. But if you wanted to know you'd ask LLM, not me, right? So I'd rather spare myself from explaining it.
> I think it's totally fine (and even good) to talk about the flaws in stuff.
To talk about the flaws and public shame are different thing, don't you think?
> So I'd rather spare myself from explaining it.
Being snarky doesn't really help your position.
> Being snarky doesn't really help your position.
Pity. I laid great hopes on that particular phrase.
It’s totally fine to talk privately with someone. Public shaming tend to have very negative effects.
> Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people
Sigh
Finally. Same effect with stock imagery. I like using a creative imagery. Hacky looking tuis like sl or pipes.sh. They have some eyecandy and make my blogs have a uniform style.
Same, I tend to assume it is a sign that AI is used across the board.
But please keep it coming. I need to spend less time idly browsing and the growing preponderance of AI is helping push me in the direction I want to go. My time spent on “social media” has dropped significantly over recent months.
“AI-generated images discourage me from reading” is a statement that’s true for me too, albeit for different reasons than offered in this post. For me, it’s the same kind of thing as “reading the text of your slides out loud”, or repeating the contention in both the introduction and conclusion.
The point of repetition is to reinforce understanding by approaching the same place from different directions, so the reader can pin down your idea at the intersection of these various thrusts. Multiple arrows from roughly the same place going in roughly the same direction don’t constrain the expressed idea, instead they just make it fuzzier.
This is not surprising. Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot. Humans assign quality relative to themselves.
A chess game between to bots is boring, no matter how strong the bots are. Humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
> A chess game between to bots is boring, no matter how ...
I'm thinking quite a few chess nerds could be interested - depending on how the game develops.
Some of the most fascinating games are between Stockfish and Leela. The quoted statement is grossly ignorant.
I dunno which I’d rather have, but I do know the only kind I’ve ever bought is the factory-made kind. So if the aim is appealing to a wide audience, you’re arguing involving robots in the production process is key?
> Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot.
The latter, of course, which is why that's what I own. Aside from that, this is an absurd and grossly dishonest analogy -- that's not at all the choice here.
Some of the most fascinating games are between Stockfish and Leela. People who don't know this know nothing about chess.
Some of the most stupid things I have ever read are from those suffering from radical anti-AI hysteria, and it is becoming a primary means by which I judge people's intelligence. ("radical" is a key word here -- there are numerous legitimate reasons to be critical of numerous aspects of the AI boom.)
I won't respond further.
Your one-short-paragraph blog post with a shallow personal preference discourages me from reading your blog.
There was zero depth to it.
I think that people upvote these kind of posts for the sake of seeing if can generate any interesting conversation in the comments.
yeah, and half of their blog is rate limited for some odd reason due to traffic
that seems lazier than whatever they're gatekeeping about
they even tried to get in front of that criticism
Human slop is slop too.
Human slop is a much better kind. There were still humans involved.
So much this, blogs add an image for the sake of having an image. At this point it would be much better to just have a random dog or a cat pic, it is as relevant to your blog post as your random generated thing, but I'd prefer seeing a random happy pup.
And if you generated a pic I suppose you also generated your post, so I'm way less likely to pay attention to it.
if cybersecurity blogs replaced AI hacker images with dog pics the world would be a better place.
Exactly, I totally forgot there even are existing apis that return open source dog and cat pictures
I have a compromise: An AI hacker image using a picture of your own dog.
Part of the problem is many bloggers think an image is required for every post. This is reinforced by algorithms which favor such posts, and drives bloggers to the easiest/fastest sources of free images.
The "featured image" in Wordpress is what gets shown on the index page, in shared social posts, and other contexts. And certainly, the algorithms favor such posts over pure text posts, even if the text content in the spartan post is far better.
There are other factors at play, too. Many bloggers are lazy, some are severely time constrained, a few are fearful of legal repercussions associated with copying images off the Internet, and a majority are creatively or technically incapable of making their own images to include on a personal blog post.
"I’d rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image."
Interesting because I'm seeing tons of YouTube channels using AI generated stick figure animations with AI voice overlays to trick people into thinking it's not AI generated.
The same goes for your business. Your AI “art” isn’t eye catching, at first glance it’s lazy. A longer glance it’s unsettling. We’re heading for a really boring period in graphic design.
It’s not like stock photos of infeasibly attractive people eating ludicrously overstuffed burgers were ever interesting or believable.
either way, looks like we're staring down the barrel of mediocrity - the AI isn't a fix. You can't really AI yourself outside of 'the average x/y/z' that these models generate. being specific with your prompting still leads to the most average version of said prompt...rinse repeat.
Of course not. Bad marketing is bad marketing.
At least stock photos don't have the documented side effect of inducing nausea.
For over a decade, people have been dropshipping slop on Etsy and apparently making money.
This seems temporary. AI generated images will become the norm for many applications. Today we wonder whether a model in an advertisement is real or generated, 5 years from know this wont even be an interesting thing to consider.
In many contexts, images are meant to illustrate a point. The human becomes the gatekeeper of generated content. The question becomes: does this picture illustrate the point I want to make. If so, you are adding your human approved stamp to the genrated output.
you are but one person
I'd rather read a blog post that includes relevant and decently made illustrations of the topic at hand (explanatory graphics etc) rather than just a wall of text. Makes no difference if these are drawn by hand or using X software or an LLM. But that's just me.
Correction: Whenever you can tell it's an AI image, it discourages you
A while back I had the same feeling and hypothesised about a "nutriscore" for AI content in media:
https://disclosure.launchbowl.com/ https://launchbowl.com/ai_nutriscore
I think AI images can enhance a blog article as long as the reader is fully aware and trusting that it's just the auxiliary material to the blog has been generated, not the main body of value.
IMHO AI-generated images are not the problem; The low effort people put in to generating them and selecting which image to go with is the problem.
Spend some time on it. Find your own style.
This has been a frequent problem on fiction writing on royal road. Author promises that they don't use AI to write and then proceed to use AI to generate the cover for the series. They might be telling the truth, but I am not going to spend the time to figure it out for myself. They are really shooting themselves in the foot. A shitty MS paint cover would be less off putting.
Have you seen Midjourney 8.2?
Pretty soon, you will not be able to tell.
What you really mean is "obvious AI-generated images".
Is this about technical blogs where the image is either of technical nature or something else?
I'd think in the former case it doesn't matter and it's mostly the text I care about to be interesting and personal. I don't read non technical blogs so I don't know what if ai images are a turnoff.
I share the author's sentiment.
But I have another hatred:
Monospace makes text harder to read and ugly. It was a necessity. It no longer is. Get over it.That’s very rich coming from a person that uses monospaced font for a blog.
I have the same reaction with AI generated YouTube thumbnails. Something in the back of my mind immediately goes "it's probably low quality content" and I'm less likely to click.
I have the same reaction with the "YouTube face" thumbnails.
You can't cater to every single person out there. The author comes as quite entitled.
The moment I see anything LLM-generated it's an instant close tab.
I don't think the internet as we know it is going to survive generative AI.
Before, the simple existence of the content of some basic level of quality was a strong signal of effort, which corresponds strongly to value. If it's there, it's worth reading.
Now, the existence of content of a basic level of quality signals nothing. It might have some value, but it's much more likely it's useless AI slop.
This principle -- if it's there it's probably worth taking a look at -- undergirded so much of system of creation, discovery, and sharing that made the internet special -- blogs, open-source, posts, comments.
It allowed the gatekeepers, middlemen, guided channels, and tolls to be removed from the creation, enjoyment, sharing, and consumption of content.
I'm worried we're going to have to go back, just to get away from the avalanche of crap people are using AI to produce at crazy rate.
100%. if I see AI slop images or videos I just click off, it's become almost automatic for me now.
I'm not gonna spend my mental bandwidth on figuring out if the thing is worth reading/whatever and that somehow the author just didn't realize that it's a net negative
Agree but how many times are the same articles and opinions reaching the top. It feels like we’re in a loop and it’s boring me out reading the same thing over and over and over again.
These are all symptoms of the adjustment period following a disruptive technology.
Eventually it'll be perfectly normal to use AI-generated content (and use AI to summarize it), and nobody will bat an eye.
Yes. Just like, shortly after the web, it became normal for 99% of content to be moneygrubbing adspam SEOslop. Normal doesn't mean good.
Just like Taboola. They are everywhere now.
The normalization process for social media involved it stabilizing in a place where a huge number of people know it’s terrible for you.
Eventually well formatted blogs won't be a symbol of effort and no one will care.
I think by "disruptive" you mean "annoying"
There is negative value in wasting vertical space to put an irrelevant prompt output in an article. It makes me question the sanity of whoever is doing this stuff. Doubly so if they actually think they dumped a bunch of AI-generated text on the internet just for people to AI-summarize it. Like... what are they DOING?
I use AI-themed images for the opener to my blog. It's typically a steampunk robot image that is not related to the topic of the post.
The actual content is written by me. If there are any code samples that were AI-generated, I'll call them out as such.
> AI-themed images for the opener
Yes, this is the exact kind of AI image usage that discourages me (and presumably this post's author) from reading the rest of it.
that is exactly the kind of thing that makes me close the tab.
like why?
to me it just means "I'm an author that likes/makes AI slop and this article is probably half if not complete AI slop or not worth reading"
I don't see how that would add any value or boost page visits
I find images are good for speed-reading; they convey information that otherwise would require much more time-consuming attention. I'm significantly more likely to read a long article, after skimming it, if it contains contextual images.
Personally, I'm okay with AI generated images as long as it's not obvious or slop: For me, a carefully-prompted image is on par with a carefully chosen photo, carefully chosen diagram, ect.
I also hold blog entries to a lower standard than professional content: I'm much more likely (after skimming) to read an imperfect non-professional blog entry than (after skimming) imperfect professional content. (And professional content is where I expect images that are higher quality than AI prompting.)
Weirdly I might slightly prefer your AI-generated image if some thought is put into it to entirely average soulless and tasteless corporate stock photo. You know multicultural team or photogenic enough person doing some meaningless staged task. Those have no chance to adding anything to the text. Same really goes for clip art.
At least with AI there might be some thought or idea behind it. Even it is lazy slop.
I stopped reading blog posts/tweets that have been AI generated.
I think the issue is we all have read a bit into a AI article before realizing it is one and realize foolishly that you have been reading drivel.
The original prompts might have had something interesting to say, but it is so layered with filler and platitudes that it is just a waste.
After being burned enough times, we hunt around for signals that an article is about to waste our time.
Not all articles with AI images are LLM written, but almost all LLM written articles have AI images.
The author is telling you a hueristic is that people are using, and for this person here, I am totally doing it.
A picture of a napkin doodle at this point is superior.
what percentage of readers does it bother though? If 2% of readers just refuse anything built/generated with AI then are they worth accommodating? It sounds crazy but i distinctly remember people slamming their fist on the desk saying they will always prefer to use the card catalog at the library instead of Google when search was really taking off. At some point you just have to move on.
I think there's a difference here between low-effort AI slop and something made with the help of AI. I always wonder how many AI images and articles we consume without realizing they were made by AI just because a human actually spent the time on making the AI create a good output.
This is more my problem with it. Obvious AI usage tends to be slop content, so any sign of it becomes a useful heuristic as to whether the subject is useless spam/slop. But I'm not anti-AI. It's a category of tools that can be useful. I think using AI as part of the editing process can be very useful. Unfortunately it also enabled more spam. And if it looks like spam, I'll instinctively treat it as such.
If you're writing about something which exists in reality, then it is possible to take a photo of it. If you're writing about something which doesn't exist in reality, then it shouldn't be accompanied by any image.
Stock photos or AI generated images are always wrong. Real photos, no matter how bland, convey information from reality and are always right.
The main problem is, those AI generated images are only so jarring because they're so obvious.
As time goes on they'll be harder to spot. We're going to need a new way of determining quality as such obvious signals have a limited shelf-life.
Not that AI generated images are always bad. They are perfectly acceptable if used for (not an exclusive list): small separators between sections in large blog posts, or other decorative features; used to illustrate things for which no real image exists (as long as it's labelled as an impression/reconstruction/etc.). They're only really a negative signal if they're used dishonestly, to claim something existed when it didn't, etc.
This might be true for technical users, average users increasingly don't care about AI images and even AI prose.
Belongs on Luddite News
Cheap AI image generation is a miracle and this article is dumb af
If a content is making a positive impact on your life, your mental health, your family's well being, your general outlook, your future, would it matter if is from AI or from human?
> If it is making a positive impact, would it matter if it's AI or human
We're drowning in this stuff, and no one has enough hours in their day to find out if obviously AI-generated slop can make a positive impact on their life. Why don't you read it and let us know? We'll continue to not engage with it.
Eh. I tend to use stock photo stuff. Even easier than AI (and most stockhouses are now using AI, themselves). If it's important to the story, I'll generally generate it, myself (I tend to use OmniGraffle a lot). I'm quite capable of making my own images.
The biggest thing, for me, is provenance. I sometimes get amazed at how people just grab any image they want, and slap it into their blog. There's a whole class of scammer, that goes around spamming fake "we're gonna sue you" letters to sites (I have gotten them, for images that I know are completely clear of obligation). If the image really was ripped off, then they won't be scammers, sending the emails.
I'd rather someone use an AI-generated image; especially if it's just "window dressing," than they put themselves into legal jeopardy, by pirating images.
My my knee jerk reaction is to agree, I really hate the obvious looking AI images, though I suspect ultimately it comes down to having good taste.
As much as I like to be on the anti AI bandwagon, for which there are plenty of good reasons. Some people use the tool (like any tool) well, to compliment their work.
Eg. this author uses great images to accompany their articles (except for one which is obviously AI), its hard to know if they are real or not but they support the text. https://tuhat.net/@jesusrrodriguez/
Regarding businesses, I think the use of bland stock images made most corporate sites awful years ago. AI is just accelerating and making it easier for the rest of us to create the lazy heartless "content" that has been so common from the corporate world.
Agree. Ai art looks like garbage.
Would photography discourage OP from reading a blog? Should I hand-paint my imagery? If I am the type of person that would use a camera, then maybe I'd be the type of person to hire a ghostwriter.
AI images are not photography.
Yet the kids can't stop doing either... Which was the OP's point.
I mean, it's a spectrum, surely...
What about stock photography, IMO as much as I personally hate "overcooked" AI-generated imagery, it doesn't annoy me that much more than stock photography does on blogs.
I do however use it as a gauge of "if the images are generated by AI, how much of the text content is?" though, so...
Yes, stock photography is also lame, but at least their creators gave permission. It's my dream that "AI" is going to make us look back and reconsider some of the pre-era slop we've accepted in the name of convenience. I doubt it, though.
People hate the false effort signaling. Photos require effort and skill to take, and while it's perhaps less than an oil painting, it's still something.
If you push AI-generated content to make stuff look fancy, it's a bad idea. If you generate stuff to communicate more clearly, I don't see a problem.
Photography is a form of art and requires human work and creativity, it isn't some clanker slop.
Have you seen the trashpile that is instagram (even pre-AI)? Ansel Adams made art, most people make garbage, there's a reason "clanker slop" performs well on socials. If that makes you angry I suggest taking up meditation because that's more likely to lead to a resolution than crying on the internet.
Serious question: are you having a particularly bad day or week? Because this was really rude and you appear to have poured out a lot more irritation than was merited.
If it were not for this, as a geeky photographer I'd get into it with you about whether Ansel Adams was really an artist, whether he's any particular benchmark or high water mark for photography, and whether individual creations are any less artistic than what he did.
Sloppers get really defensive.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I crash your anti-AI pity party to try and get you to at least be logically consistent human beings? That must be pretty threatening.
You seem significantly more aggrieved than me here.
> most people make garbage,
That's fine, that's what sets truly great art apart. Not that it terribly matters, more care and ingenuity goes into even some shit instagram thirst trap picture than every clanker slop ever output combined.
These are lifeless things. Their only value is by referencing human creation which they debase with their very existence.
Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process.
https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made with AI as slop is any different from people rejecting photographs because they were made with chemicals and lenses.
In 100 years the same article will be written about AI art, and will probably feature the phrase “clanker slop”.
Can you show me one AI image with artistic value?
OK.
If you use images on your blog, even if you are scrupulous about sourcing them, purchase licenses, or go by the same low-resolution "fair use" rules that Wikipedia does, you will get several letters a year from law firms claiming they represent a client who owns the right to that photo.
Rather than wasting time sorting all these out when the images are there mostly to break up a wall of text, some blogs simply use a few AI images. This way if those letters come, they can simply put them in the bin.
I don't object to this use of AI images at all.
I don’t have a problem with ai generated media in blogs at all. Nobody is going to take the time to hand draw a piece of art for a blog that takes them less than an hour to write. Pictures speak a thousand words and serve as a great intro to a blog post. Embrace the future.
Hurray for an intelligent comment. It's alarming how much idiocy results from this radical anti-AI hysteria. e.g., someone here said that a set of slides "packed with information" was "completely worthless" because it lacked "an actual point of view" from "actual people".
Ok? That's nice.
As someone who adds AI generated images on blog entries, I just do not give a shit if some people have opinions like this. Jog on?
The vast majority of bloggers in 2026 do so for their own edification, to their own preferences and choices. Whining about what they do is decided a beggars being choosers thing.
For me the breaking point for images in texts was stock photos.
Before that, when there was a photo in the article it was a frame from a footage from the event or the photo, or the schematic of the device the article was about or something. Something relevant to that particular piece of information.
But then everything became click-bait factory illustrated by images that fit the mood.
AI images don't make it worse. Don't make it better. But they might if they get better at relevant infographics. For now they aren't good enough because they rely on a human for understanding of what are they to depic and humans often don't care enough.
There is no "before that", not on the internet. Stock photography as a business is more than a century old, and we were using it on the internet as soon as you could put an IMG tag in a page.
Lazy use of stock imagery is a problem.
I find them very interesting and they make me more likely to remember your blog. I was reading that Gas Town post yesterday and despite all the backlash about the whimsical world and the ai images being sloppy and wrong, they still stuck in my brain more than anything else I’ve read this year.
The author say they’d prefer Microsoft paint images but actually I don’t think this is true of most audiences. People have the ability to make terrible paint images for decades and they’ve never caught anyone’s attention in a positive way, it’s not going to start now.
OP’s blog of white text on black background will be forgotten quickly. If I visit it again, I will have no recollection of ever having visited. I’m not saying they need to use AI, but to oppose AI with the opposite —- minimal design or even intentionally crappy design — will not have the intended effect of communicating “this is quality human-authored content”, it will just be forgettable.
On the other hand, plenty of art can lean into being intentionally brash and be all the more memorable for it. The phrase "bad MS paint blog" immediately makes me think of Hyperbole and a Half[1] where the style feeds into the zany ADHD vibe of the blog.
Often, you find ugliness and rule breaking as a backlash to an overly polished status quo. AM radio rock gave way to punk, hair metal gave way to grunge, and EDM gave way to hyperpop. The most iconic album cover of 2024 was the word "brat" badly rendered on a plain, garish background.[2]
[1] https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/05/sneaky-hate-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_(album)
Yeah that’s cool as an intentional style. Here’s my favorite example, and the style definitely caused it to be sticky and viral:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpjgl2baLs
(Then again I was like 15 when this appealed to me…)
If the blog is otherwise not about being amusing or edgy, then the MS Paint is going to send a different vibe. In your examples the paint sets the vibe, which I think is what they were going for.
> People have the ability to make terrible paint images for decades and they’ve never caught anyone’s attention in a positive way
Citation needed for this one. It could be because people don't do it very much? I think a very good piece of writing coupled with a crappy but intentional MS Paint piece could be very attention catching and memorable.
> OP’s blog of white text on black background will be forgotten quickly.
I actually get annoyed with the tech crowd always complaining at seemingly the slightest bit of flair or fun added to any blog. To each their own, of course. I've seen some really slick minimal blogs but I do like it when layouts gets creative--gawdy, even!--, so long as I can read the text. And you can always use reader mode.
From [0] https://nelson.cloud/about/#skills
> Other: Claude Code
Then the author said:
> I know there are 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.
So it is OK for you to use AI generation tools like Claude Code and likely using it in your blog or using it to generate code, but it isn't OK for you to see someone else using AI to generate images?
With the above already stated, that means the author cannot guarantee that not a single use of AI was used in their blog at all given that we know they use Claude.
Why preach fake principles with virtue signalling and then break your own standards in your own blog post?
"I’d rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image."
The problem is, there are also AI generated MS Paint drawings that you can't tell is AI. We are only noticing the AI images that are in an 'AI' style. The AI tools allow you to make images you can't tell is AI.
> I'd rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image.
So spot on!
And, with that Paint drawing, it'll probably illustrate what you mean and at the same time we establish some kind of trust; I'll know this is not just mere AI slop.
Clearly this was written by AI
niceeee
I need everything to be 100% ORIGINAL and AUTHENTIC. AI Generation is obviously slop: unforgivable and death-sentence worthy. Stock photo? Please, I NEED YOU TO TAKE A PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN COURSE FOR YOUR BLOG. Go to art school or else I won't even consider looking at your website.
Heh you write like someone from 4chan. That's not what the author is saying though.
>Please, I NEED YOU TO TAKE A PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN COURSE FOR YOUR BLOG. Go to art school or else I won't even consider looking at your website.
Did you read tfa?
>I’d rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image.
And I'd rather see the Mona Lisa.
Fuck it, I love em
meh - you're just acting old.
young people will get used to GenAI as a style and it'll become the new normal.
you can see it in the flowery AI writing that's proliferating into email and docs.
Not at all. Prevalence does not equal acceptance.
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g...
What I read , my western ego is so big I want to place my opinion everywhere possible .
Image is content , ai can generate art level images and an obvious slop . To read or or not is absolutely up to reader , not someone’s entitled opinion .
Still better than AI generated text.
No one is reading your blog anyway, they are looking for the video.
I agree. The human experience is the only thing that matters. If AI tries to replace or supersede that, then it's bad AI.