Please 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
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.
@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
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
@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.
But the boundaries are blurring because genAI photos are appearing more often there. In addition, some software or cameras already work with algorithms (for image sharpness, filters). @baldur
@priscillaharing Most bloggers don't have the money to pay an artist - there the popularity of AI images starts. Most people don't know that AI is trained by scraping originals.
@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.
People wouldn't cheat for a blog perhaps but the technology for misinformation works. @futurebird
@NatureMC@baldur@futurebird I think we're talking about very different things as if they're the same here. Use an AI for what is essentially a deepfake can be very hard to spot because the engine just finds the person in question & use actual pics of them - but more "generic" scenes tend to get more of a style to them (because the engine basically averages out a lot of imagery to get there...
@baldur What’s actually funny about this is that every single article we put up @hello is literally just heavily-edited Public Domain media tortured and altered in GIMP.
You can make some really amazing things with low-tech solutions.
@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.
And it sounds perhaps crazy but human artists exist who work with generative AI.
@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.
I know the term "generated AI art". In art itself, ‘generated art’ is not generally associated with AI. Video artists, for example, generate performances using different techniques (without AI).
I just wanted to be sure about what do we speak here? I suppose it's generative AI art?
@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
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