To whoever needs to hear this:
Your blog is better without an image than with an AI-generated one. I came here to read your words — let them stand for themselves!
If you *must* use an image, and some soulless AI mockery would suffice, do this instead:
Step outside, and take a photo of wherever you are.
Include a lot of sky, if you can.
This implicit "here's where I am" is a better reflection of your work than whatever midjourney or stable diffusion would splort out.
@spiralganglion the most respected blogger in my professional area uses AI art on every post now. Lost a ton of respect for them for it.
@spiralganglion or shot in the dark go find an artists doing commissions and pay someone? its usually not that expensive
@spiralganglion Two things, unfortunately...
1) Never underestimate what kind of geolocation can be done off a simple sky photo, especially time-correlated to a blog post
2) Some kind if image is almost certainly important for getting attention. I don't use them (haven't put the effort into wiring up the right semantic tagging for Hugo to flag the first image as the "blog post image" or whatever), but the difference between how they show up in microblog reshares with and without an image is notable, and makes a huge difference on whether people bother to click on it (unless you're an already established author and your name has pull).
Which sucks, because I don't much care to play the game. But that is the game.
@spiralganglion Two things, unfortunately...
1) Never underestimate what kind of geolocation can be done off a simple sky photo, especially time-correlated to a blog post
2) Some kind if image is almost certainly important for getting attention. I don't use them (haven't put the effort into wiring up the right semantic tagging for Hugo to flag the first image as the "blog post image" or whatever), but the difference between how they show up in microblog reshares with and without an image is notable,