Please do not add genAI images to punch up your writing.
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Please do not add genAI images to punch up your writing. You might think that it adds a nice little bit of visual pizazz to your content-marketing piece, but what you're actually doing is *making it look like content marketing* rather than a useful resource. To the extent that content marketing is an effective tactic, it is because you build trust with the customer by providing them valuable information. A genAI turd plopped on top of your writing is a signal that it will be worthless slop.
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@glyph I'm already noticing myself developing a new mutant strain of what used to be called banner blindness, where if I open a page and see a big AI-generated image at the top my brain instantly stops processing anything else that's there
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I understand the appeal, I also wish I were a competent illustrator, I also see some genAI stuff that looks kinda neat, I learned about the dollar-bill rule when I was the layout editor for my high school newspaper, I understand wanting to break up big blocks of text with visual interest for lighter writing. This is why, when I can, I take custom photos or include relevant classical art in my blog. Sometimes I'll even just use a stock image. It feels like genAI is like that but more customized.
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But it isn't. Unless you are a *real* master with these tools there is an unavoidable sheen that they leave on the generated image. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. This is not just me; if you go anywhere that younger people are congregating online, "boomer art" is the *most* polite thing that they call this stuff. It damages your credibility. If you were lazy enough to fake the image, are you lazy enough to fake the facts? It is *much* worse than just having no image at all.
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This is hardly an original insight. Lots of other people are posting this exact advice. But I want to emphasize it because I just passed on linking to a page for like the 10th time this week because it included a big genAI hero image which looked like absolute shit. Scanning the article briefly it actually looked pretty good, it did not read like LLM slop, but it is a reputational risk to link to something that will give readers that immediate negative impression, and it's not worth it.
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@glyph If it is that article about monetizing a blog (that I passed on several times for the same reason): That image *has* to be diffusion model garbage. Nothing else would make the particular point it's trying to make.