Here's a question that I hope is not too off-topic.

Do people find the nano-banana cartoon infographics to be helpful, or distracting? Personally, I'm starting to tire seeing all the little cartoon people and the faux-hand-drawn images.

Wouldn't Tufte call this chartjunk?

I haven't come around any AI generated imagery in documents / slides that adds any value. It's more the opposite, they stand out like a sore thumb and often even reduce usability since text cannot be copied. Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI.

When I see AI images, I skip them, and most likely, the entire article. They're a better warning sign than the ones hidden in the text.

This is equivalent to "do people find PowerPoint to be helpful or distracting." Sometimes yes, mostly no.

In this case, I'd say helpful because I didn't have to read the article at all to understand what was being communicated.

Tufte is evergreen. Zinsser is another.

> Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

> Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?

On Writing Well (Zinsser)

I never trust them to actually be correct. Aka they're probably worse than useless.

Most of the time I find them distracting, and sometimes a huge negative on the article. In this particular article though, they're well done and relevant, and I think they add quite a bit. It's a highly personal opinion kind of thing though for sure.

LinkedIn loves these, even if they're broken.

But they had already lost me at all the links, and the fact there's not a red wire through the entire article.

The first thing my eyes skimmed was:

> CLAUDE.md: Claude’s instruction manual

> This is the most important file in the entire system. When you start a Claude Code session, the first thing it reads is CLAUDE.md. It loads it straight into the system prompt and keeps it in mind for the entire conversation.

No it's not. Claude does not read this until it is relevant. And if it does, it's not SOT. So no, it's argumentatively not the most important file.

I think it's fine. As someone who blogged a lot, the instant visual differentiation among articles offered by the art within is actually valuable.

I am a victim of AI-documentation-slop at work, and the result is that I've become far more "Tuftian" in my preferences than ever before. In the past, I was a fan of beautiful design and sometimes liked nice colors and ornaments. Now, though, I've a fan of sparse design and relevant data (not information -- lots of information is useless slop). I want content that's useful and actionable, and the majority of the documents many of my peers create using Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT are fluffy broadsheets of irrelevant filler, rarely containing insights and calls-to-action.

So yes, it's chartjunk.

It's not necessarily an AI-generated infographics issue, it's that these aren't good infographics. The graphic part is adding minimal value.

My eye has started skipping past them, even though they're often quite useful if you engage with them.

I think the problem is that they're uninformative slop often enough that I've subconsciously determined they aren't worth risking attention time on.

No. It adds nothing so nothing is preferred