[mrintegrity]

Totally off topic but I am getting tired of the AI generated images used on nearly all blog posts nowadays. They are instantly recognisable, it just seems low effort and lowers the feeling of quality one might otherwise have

[sdedovic]

To me, its more about the style than the use of an AI. But I agree.

I enjoyed this writeup by Michael Lynch on finding an illustrator [1], for their blog. In doing some of my own writing, I've really found it enlightening how much secondary work goes into publishing your own work. I often think its so nice to be able to _just_ plug in what I want on a site and get a (more or less) free illustration. But as someone selling their own work / time, it feels wrong. I'd rather pay a real human and build a relationship and have something more quality. On the other hand, though, it can be expensive, time consuming, and I've been screwed over. Often it seems like a bigger risk than its worth.

So idk, you're trading some hardship and risk for an ethical dilemma but ease of use.

[1] https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/

[cpeterso]

Worse yet, the dining philosophers in the image have too many hands. No wonder they’re deadlocking! :)

[smarks]

Clearly, those are virtual hands.

[mort96]

Between the shitty obviously-AI-generated square header image with floating hands everywhere, the equally shitty obviously-AI-generated image in the middle and the "Please pay for Medium" banner which takes up literally half the page, this blog post does its utmost to make a truly terrible impression.

[blindriver]

I prefer AI generated images over stock photos though. You can tell that both are phony, but at least the AI can be a bit more creative.

[bigbillheck]

People in stock photos can generally be counted on to have no more than a traditional number of hands.

[layer8]

Th issue is that we’re now getting tons of blog posts with AI-generated images that previously didn’t dare to use stock photos.

[Zardoz84]

I prefer no images over IA stolen/generated images.

[jazzyjackson]

> ...the Taft Test:

> Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?

> If so, then, maybe all those images aren’t adding a lot to your article. At the very least, leave Taft there! You just admitted it looks better.

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

[datadeft]

What is IA stolen?

[jjgreen]

stolen by French AI of course

[minimaxir]

There's a quality spectrum of AI-generated header images. Some are just random DALL-E output which aren't intrinsically relevant to the article (like the one used in this article), but you can have a little fun with it and do something distinct. This may require more control than just using Bing Image Creator.

Also, a thumbnail tip: square thumbnails are bad. If you have to use a square 1024x1024 AI generation, crop it to something like 1024x575, which incidentally can make things difficult if using AI generation since figuring out what to crop requires human intervention.

[mort96]

There's a quality spectrum of AI-generated images, sure, but they're all equally artistically void.

[hoseja]

Not all.

[mort96]

Yeah they are. Art is communication. Computers don't communicate, they generate.

[Someone]

> since figuring out what to crop requires human intervention.

I don’t know how good they are, but people have trained models on that problem. Googling “autocrop tool” gives me multiple options.

[minimaxir]

Fair point.

[gcau]

It cheapens it, making it look like AI-generated seo-blog-spam. I'd rather a technical diagram or some plain icons, at least that would look tasteful.

[sureglymop]

I just don't really understand the value they're supposed to bring. If everyone uses the same looking generates images it just makes all the blogs look the same again. Then the thing is, they usually have nothing to do with the actual article. So why not just leave them out and not waste space.

[nottorp]

All the SaaS sites featured on HN now and then also look the same :)

[kelnos]

I dislike the style this particular author chose, but don't object in general. Assuming the images are actually somewhat relevant (or at least funny), I think I'd prefer an AI-generated image over a big wall of text.

To each their own, though, of course.

[alpaca128]

The text is the only reason to visit the blog, so why waste bandwidth with images of four-handed people?

At least they could try and generate something where I can't see malformed bodies within seconds. Or create a nice diagram that actually adds something to the text.

[Mashimo]

> why waste bandwidth with images of four-handed people?

In the end it's just 2x 40kb

[alpaca128]

So that makes a signal to noise ratio of 1:5 given the text including code is just 14kB.

[Mashimo]

For me the top 3 files downloaded by size are all js files that are about 450kb in total.

Also like 7 font files for ~100kb

[mort96]

What value does AI slop add though?

[patmorgan23]

What value does a random stock image add?

[mort96]

Very little, but it might at least have the right amount of hands and a sensible aspect ratio

[azinman2]

Typically it’ll be in lieu of nothing or stock photography. Doesn’t it seem better than that?

[dmart]

Not really. I wish the trend of giant generic hero images on every blog post would go away, they almost never add any value. I think it was Medium that started the trend.

[minimaxir]

Unfortunately all social media sharing requires a thumbnail for easy clicking, no real way around it. (with Hacker News as the lone exception of course)

The default thumbnails in lieu of your own aren't good.

[troupo]

> all social media sharing requires a thumbnail for easy clicking, no real way around it

This doesn't mean you need a giant hero header, or an AI generated image, or even any images in your posts at all.

[Tomte]

Use og:image then: https://ogp.me/

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

I’ll honestly take the “put some text in the thumbnail” trend that GitHub, Nuxt Content, etc all do, over a low-quality image.

[iknowstuff]

They do add value, they make clicks more likely.

[logifail]

> They do add value, they make clicks more likely

"Making clicks more likely" is a terrible measure of genuine value.

There are lots of images which will make people click, even if once they see your page they click 'Back' a second later. Our metrics are broken if we continue to attribute that click as 'success'.

[diggan]

> "Making clicks more likely" is a terrible measure of genuine value.

Genuine value, to who? For the author, getting more clicks is probably of "genuine value", depending on their goals for their writing. But seems most people are not writing and publishing stuff today because they think it provides value to others, but because they think it'll provide value to themselves somehow.

[alpaca128]

The question is: do you actually want to attract people who only click because of an image? And if you AI-generate it, are you fine with parts of the target audience not clicking on obvious AI thumbnails because they assume the entire content is low-effort?

[usrusr]

One is aesthetic filler that is true to its purpose of loosening up the typography of a wall of text. The other tends to be awkwardly clever on a level of awkward that was unknown to mankind until recently. I used to hate stock photography fillers just like everybody else, but now my preference is as clear as it would be surprising to past me.

[i80and]

Genuinely it's a downgrade in my opinion

[happymellon]

Considering it adds nothing but 5 megs of noise.

No.

[DeathArrow]

Whole Medium thing seems low effort. I hardly remember reading a well written article there.

[nottorp]

Interesting. Now that you mention it, there are illustrations there. But I'm pretty sure I subconsciously scrolled past them to get to the rest of the article without consciously noticing them on the first read.

Generated or hand drawn, they're kinda a wasted effort on a technical post.

[tazjin]

I also subconsciously scrolled past them. Anything unexpectedly colourful and so on just hits some sort of mental adblock for me now.

[Zetobal]

At least you now know which of your peers have no taste and strange beauty standards. Some images posted by my colleagues for everyone to see on LinkedIn look like sexist propaganda cartoons.

Stock images used to hide this "quality" better than I thought.

[ta8645]

Honestly, the images attached to the article seemed great to me; they were colorful and fun. I don't see any reason to care who or what created them.

[Rapzid]

I like the image. It's cute and it's fun picking out the defects.

[davidgerard]

exactly. It says "I can't be bothered producing this" and I feel like, so why should I be bothered reading it?

[kelnos]

Ah yes, let's take the most uncharitable explanation and assume that's the case.

Maybe they have no artistic ability of their own? Maybe they just aren't good at finding the kinds of images (that can be freely used without infringing on anyone's copyright) that they need?

If it were me, and the guidance was "never use AI generated images in your blog post", I would probably just not use any images at all. Which I guess for some people would probably be best. But personally I prefer walls of text to be broken up by... something.

[ed_elliott_asc]

It’s something I struggle with - I really can’t draw, I really really can’t draw on a computer.

In the past I’ve used lots of screenshots which seems to work well.

Where I have used images I have cut and pasted and used things like canva but nothing has ever really ended up as I would have liked it.

[davidgerard]

It shouldn't be so hard to realise that if you make your blog post look how spam looks, it'll look like spam.

[danielovichdk]

Kinda like when someone pulls in FOSS code or a package without contributing or at least email the authors.

[MrBuddyCasino]

Someone (not me) put it like this:

"to the trained eye you can already see that every single ai generated image is a picture of the same thing"

[alpaca128]

That applies to every generative AI, not just images. Generate a bunch of text with LLMs and you'll also see patterns emerging that it won't ever break out of.