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by ChilledTonic 922 days ago
Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream.

I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just space filler. Especially when you can't even curate the image generated well enough to have every person in the image have the correct number of fingers.

10 comments

I often do have a clear image in my mind for an article. I can not draw it and I don't have the budget to hire someone to do it.

The image is meant to convey a feeling. It is meant to make an abstract concept from the article a little more tangible.

In the past, I'd search for images on the net that I could use to accomplish that. Now I can craft them with DALL-E, and they are usually much better.

This image should complement the article. Just like the text of the article is meant to convey some information, feeling, or concept, the image should do a bit of that as well.

I don't know the exact word for the style, but this article is pretty egregious for the overly stylised "AI art". This just looks cheap, obviously "AI", and is pretty distracting for me. I don't know if that was the intention or not, but it's a detractor for me.
Quality of writing and quality of imagery varies a lot. It’s hard to do.
It looks like an ad for a shitty mobile game.
Agreed, the issue isn't AI, it’s poor taste. Nobody wants to see what looks like an uncanny valley picture of all large ethnic groups smiling weirdly in a circle at each other. This bizarre soulless corpo art trend started well before AI generation rocketed in popularity.
It's not just AI art. Memes and unrelated stock image have also been used. It might be due to some SEO belief.
God I hate memes on medium pages.
"Medium" itself is generally a good heuristic for trash that isn't worth the time reading.
Truly. I have it blocked in my kagi search together with pinterest, w3schools and other similar things like that. Can’t say I miss it.
Me too, especially when the underlying root cause is siloed communication arising from founder burnout or sheer disinterest not the supply of product management thinking. It's as if you needed the subtractive design thinking of the two Bobs in office space and what you got instead was aimless growth of product like cancer.
Is it any worse than a photo model’s pipe dream about what they are shooting? People on stock photos rarely know anything about the profession or the situation they represent besides basic ideas like looking smart, busy or chatty. They just have to look good at the same time.
Blog articles you could take seriously didn’t use to have stock photos. It may not be worse, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad.
I think my brain automatically blocks out stock photos, because I didn't even notice this post had an image.

But there's something funny about this. The blog template requires an image bucket, so mindlessly fill it with something, right? Too hard, so find a bland stock photo. Too hard, so purposefully generate a bland stock photo. Uninspired tasteless AI garbage is going to overtake everything in short order.

Even before this, the trend of hero image which takes up most of the space above the fold, has been insufferable. This is just a continuation of that, which hasn't gone away either.

Here's an article on selinux, bit first an image of a leaf.

> the correct number of fingers

I like how one of the tablets seems to devolve into a paper notepad at the bottom, and how the notebook display on the right seems to be transparent and twisted.

I don’t mind AI art except that it’s so often cringe. Half of the time I wonder if it’s meant tongue-in-cheek, or if the author really feels it’s an authentic fit to the article.
The most sad part is imagining the prompt that he used, and how hard he tried to add black, whites, women... respecting the politically correct numbers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1717jqk/chatgpt_da...

Yeah DALLE-3 has this in the system prompt.

> Diversify depictions of ALL images with people to include DESCENT and GENDER for EACH person using direct terms. Adjust only human descriptions.

> EXPLICITLY specify these attributes, not abstractly reference them. The attributes should be specified in a minimal way and should directly describe their physical form.

> Your choices should be grounded in reality. For example, all of a given OCCUPATION should not be the same gender or race. Additionally, focus on creating diverse, inclusive, and exploratory scenes via the properties you choose during rewrites. Make choices that may be insightful or unique sometimes.

> Use "various" or "diverse" ONLY IF the description refers to groups of more than 3 people. Do not change the number of people requested in the original description.

> Don't alter memes, fictional character origins, or unseen people. Maintain the original prompt's intent and prioritize quality.

> Do not create any imagery that would be offensive.

> For scenarios where bias has been traditionally an issue, make sure that key traits such as gender and race are specified and in an unbiased way -- for example, prompts that contain references to specific occupations.

>Don't alter memes, fictional character origins, or unseen people.

I wonder what not telling it to avoid altering unseen people does.

That is quite interesting. Maybe they're trying to keep it from manifesting additional people - if the user requests a scene where logically more people are present than visible (maybe it's first-person, or the view from the front row of a theater) and ChatGPT crafts a prompt which describes the physical characteristics of the unseen people, Dall-e will probably include them in the image it generates.
There's no need to do this, because DALL-E already automatically injects those things into your prompts behind the scenes.
I spent less than 5 seconds in the prompt. Dall-e is quite politically correct, I guess :)
What would be so sad about it?
Wokeism is sad.
That’s a fair take.