Thoughts on AI generated illustrations for articles
Thoughts on AI generated illustrations for articles
Recently, I saw a post on Lemmy of an article that piqued my interest, at least enough to try to validate the information in it. When I followed the link, I was greeted with a clearly AI generated image (it showed trump with an extra finger).
I immediately lost trust in the article and made a comment regarding that. (Link)
But the reaction to this was surprising to me. I got a response stating that the author has a background of being an established writer and reporter, as well as received a lot of downvotes. However, no one responded to my points on the use of AI.
My thoughts are that if you are making money on something, then you need to avoid AI when possible and reasonable.
What's going on here? Am I wrong and this is somehow an acceptable use of AI?
[Edit] side note of something that that just occurred to me: don't go to that thread to manipulate the votes or start ""brigading"" against it for the AI. I just wanted to discuss it here. Thanks.
AI just screams "lazy" and "lack of care". If they don't care that every article they put out has a completely unnecessary AI image in it, what guarantee do I have they care about any of the content on their website?
If they can't afford an image then it's better to have none than to give money to a company that will DDOS their servers with web-scrappers.
In my eyes, AI = Complete disregard for quality control.
Agreed. It shows a lack of standards which you want from people informing you about reality in a trustworthy and accurate way.
i totally agree with you: ai pic = lazy, and makes me instantly think that the text attached to it was regurgitated by ShitGPT.
I think the chances that Greg Palast is using generative AI to write his articles for him are extremely low.
nevertheless, i'm against generative AI, i don't want any of this slop to be served to me. if you can't afford paying an artist or license something valuable to illustrate your article, leave it.
If I see evidence of AI in any space on a page (aside, obviously, from one that is analyzing AI) I assume that the page has nothing worth reading.
I doubt I will miss anything of value by this assumption.
So I'm with you. Putting AI "art" on an article is just a sign of dishonesty and taints the writing as well.
I agree with you and your immediate loss of trust when seeing ai-generated images, especially in news articles. My view is that if you are an established media company, then it’s your responsibility to pay for legal illustrations/images. Whether that be hiring an illustrator to make something from scratch or buying the rights to an existing image, participating in that market keeps creatives employed and keeps the quality of the art high, or a least not filled with seven-fingered people. Once we give up on artists creating new works and rely only on remixing drivel without permission, we’ll lose quite a lot of creativity, and people can obviously tell the difference.
I’m a little more ambivalent about independent journalists or newly spun-up media companies that are still getting their bearings using image generators, but frankly my impression whenever I see one even on a small independent site is still “yuck, no image would be better than this crap.”
So yeah, there are definitely more important things to be upset about when it comes to AI being shoved down our throats, but this also bothers me a lot.
AI images just remind me of bad YouTube video thumbnails or Taboola ads. 99% of the time it’s a sign of something low quality and not worth my time.
What does that illustration add to the article? Even if it was human-drawn, that illustration would tell me that it's just an "outrage" style article and that any information I read there is suspect.
Eventually we might not be able to discern between "natural" and "generated" images. Also there are plenty of instances where it's probably ok to use generated images (eg. wikihow). Etc.
So I think it depends entirely on context and honesty. If someone is using a generated image in a dishonest way for some political purpose, then that's probably bad. If someone uses a generated image to make a cartoon about cooking pancakes, then that seems ok.
(Routine disclaimer: Image generation is not "AI" but just statistics applied to big data.)
Of all the possible uses of AI, this seems like the least offensive to me.
Sure, I would somewhat agree to "among the least offensive" but it's not entirely free of it. Particularly if you are an established writer/researcher, why would you stoop to that level and associate yourself with the use of AI in your work at all? You should easily have the means to pay for an illustration either from stock or an artist, so you're willing to add slop in your work? For what? Convenience?
I don't disagree, I just think of everything regarding AI out there, there are better uses of time in terms of complaints/criticism.