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Baldur Bjarnason

@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

4 comments
Baldur Bjarnason

@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 🙂)

Priscilla Haring-Kuipers

@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
Stock photos to me also indicates a lower class article as really good (well paid) writing is under a serious editorial team that would have some artists/photographers as well

Baldur Bjarnason

@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.

Baldur Bjarnason

@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.

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