| Integrity. I will get modded down and probably flagged for this because it's not just dissent but existential threat on HN, but this means: Don't ever use AI generated content [0]. The pictures, the words, the video, the voices, any of it. Because not caring about creative choices poisons your integrity. e.g. for illustrations: - if you can draw well, do that. Find a way to capture them consistently, use those - if you can manage a half-arsed sketch, do that. Find a way to capture them consistently (or use some of the minimal tricks in an iPad drawing app to fix them up). Make a virtue of it. - if you can't draw at all, do you know someone you could ask? Or are there relevant sketches in the Flickr Commons or whatever. Or get just good enough that you can make a virtue of being crap at it. For photographs: - if you can photograph something relevant, do that - if not, use a stock library. Pay, preferably, but credit if not. Or use the Flickr Commons and find something relevant Failing all this, illustrate with something irrelevant but contemporaneous. Write your stuff, and shoot photos on your phone of your day as you write. Use a photograph from your phone that captures the day you wrote the article. Write a little caption to do it. Make a virtue of this sort of separate parallel stream of your content. But no AI-generated content. Ever. [0] except maybe when you're writing about AI-generated content. But please, if you can, find something else to write about. Integrity 102: don't shoehorn AI into every conversation. |