Gregory's ServerPlease stop using generated art for thumbnails and illustrations for videos and blog posts that aren’t generated themselves. It gives people the impression that the post is spammy bullshit. Starting to see people dismiss links out of hand just because of the preview thumbnail on social media
 30 comments
 @baldur I reject articles with generated art not because of perceived low effort but on principle. Side note; I love how everyone can instinctively spot generated text and art now. We came from “omg we’re all going to be blackmailed by fake photos” to “omg, enough with this fake bullshit” in a few months 😂 @baldur isn't this the same for stock photos? Which would be the other option for people writing but not making visuals (like myself) @priscillaharing Stock photos don’t have as many tells. Between the colour scheme, upscaling artefacts, depth weirdness, text handling, off anatomy and the rest, generative art is kinda easy to spot, for the most part. Almost all of it has at least one of the tells out of the box I also think stock photos require a bit more effort in general than generative art, for the most part In any case, I’ve never seen people dismiss something I’ve linked to out of hand because it used stock photography @priscillaharing (I’d also argue that most posts don’t need generic visuals. If it has a specific purpose and is needed to complement the text, sure, but I’m sceptical about claims that generic images make any sort of difference to either traffic or reception. But that’s an entirely separate debate and not relevant here 🙂) @baldur visuals 'draw the eye' and most writers are required to deliver royalty free visuals with any article. I would expect a most fitting use case here where generated visuals replace other non-artistic, soulless visuals @priscillaharing Oh, I'm sure that writers are required to deliver visuals. I just think that the "draw the eye" statement for web-based articles is a superstition based on a small number of badly structured studies that were made years ago in a very very different environment, but that's not something the writers can do anything about so not really something that can be constructively debated And again, generated art is becoming to stock photo what stock photo is to editorial photography. @priscillaharing Ah, sorry about the digression in the previous post. Still drinking my morning coffee. The point I was trying to get across is that generated art, because of its statistical nature, tends to have a number of shared artifacts that are fairly easy to spot. Which makes them immediately counterproductive in any context where they appear as a preview thumbnail.  @priscillaharing Normally, stock photos are photographed by humans and sometimes edited with software by humans (Paintshop, or making it less blurred etc.) It is only a special kind of selling photos or give them for free. Therefore, many seem to be soulless: You make enough money you have to sell masses. @priscillaharing 2/2 Nevertheless, such a photo can come from famous photographers. It's complex. @baldur That time has already come. I see plenty of anti-AI generated images on FB groups. (by plenty I mean two or three in recent days).  @baldur I largely agree with this observation— however ‘AI style’ is a rapidly moving target— a target invested in *not* being distinctive or detectable. Right now AI-synthesized speech is robust enough that most of us could not reliably detect a generated voice speaking one or two words (although, given a full sentence, we might be successful) I’ve been fooled by writing especially for more technical articles. (see my ranting on online misinformation about ants) @futurebird Yeah. Though, unlike audio and text, generated images are still originally quite low res so almost all of it has that "oddly sharp" upscaling style even when it doesn't have any of the other tells. @baldur Unfortunately, as a journalist, I have to say that the falsification of photos also by AI is now so advanced that even trained professionals have to go to ever greater lengths to recognise it. It sometimes requires specialised technology. And media literacy in social media is not as high as one might wish. @baldur on lobste.rs I usually now see most posts with a GAN hero image on them attract a couple downvotes marked "spam". @baldur "that aren’t generated themselves": what do you want to say? Art is always generated by one or some artists. This means that a human (or even an animal) has painted, photographed, drawn, glued it etc. @NatureMC You seem to have decided to reply in a confrontational manner to a post where I put in effort not to be confrontational. If you intended this to be a constructive reply, then you probably should have phrased it differently Like I said, people are more and more dismissing links out of hand because they spot that the preview thumbnail is a generated image Using a generated image to illustrate writing that isn't generated gives people on social media the false impression that it's spam @baldur Sorry, that's probably because English is a foreign language for me. I didn't want to be confrontational, but I wanted to ask what exactly you mean by this expression for the sake of my understanding. @baldur I only tried to explain this in my post to explain my question. Again sorry for my bad English. @NatureMC So, in colloquial English, “generated art” is usually taken to mean the same thing as “generative art”. That is, something algorithmically generated, which today largely means something created using a statistical generative model such as a diffusion model or GAN. It’s a superset that includes both “AI” generated art and that created by simpler algorithms, although the simpler generated art doesn’t have the same negative connotations among audiences @baldur Thank you for explaining your post. This is exactly what I wanted to know. @baldur It seems that hosting sites (substack) are now adding genAI link preview images automatically, without the knowledge of the post author or them even appearing in the actual post. This is because on certain social sites (facebook) posts without a preview image get fewer clicks…. and clicks are everything. 😉 |
Generated art correlates strongly with low effort writing and video. But I keep seeing developer types in my feed reader use generated illustrations without seemingly realising how an increasing number of readers interpret it
And it’s only a matter of time until “generative art = spammy bullshit” will be the majority position because that’s how the economics of it are going to play out. Using extruded synthetic art will not do your writing or video any favours in the long run.