To me there are different motivations to include imagery and some of them are just fine with AI generation. If the imagery actually goes to the substance of helping to illustrate or explain the actual content then it seems very superficial to reject it based on how it was generated. In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand that could have been done an easier way.

The problem comes when the imagery is placed as a false value signal. If it is designed to send a signal of "this content took a lot of effort to produce because an image that would be hard for a human to make is attached to it" - but the image was generated without that effort, then it's basically a lie and insult to the reader.

[delayed]

AI-generated images discourage me from interacting with any entity AT ALL. Bar / restaurant posters, events, shops, anything. Because it makes the brand appear lazy. And in a weird way "anti-human". I don't have a better word than that.

I find AI generated text way worse than images. I get a migraine from reading it.

There’s also a class of “detailed agent written technical blog” that’s you can just scan and get the shape that it’s long paragraphs, tables of statistics, and dry LLM writing. You notice the blog has one or more such posts a day.

It’s a turnoff immediately if someone shares what their agent wrote.

It also has happened a few times they contain a fair number of misrepresentations and mistakes.

I write a blog and have always avoided AI images for exactly the reasons cited here. AI images feel like a more cynical version of stock imagery, for some reason. I think it's actually too bad because in a lot of cases AI images would actually be really great to include and a lot more evocative... but there's just no way to do it that doesn't inspire revulsion.

I’m inclined to agree, but not as much because the image was generated with AI but rather because it’s rare for such images to exhibit taste. They feel like the visual equivalent of gilded twinkies, which is offputting.

Selecting a stock image doesn’t have this effect, even if it’s not related to the post. Even the most unremarkable stock image has the fingerprints of its artist, and the choice itself can reveal things about the author. They don’t have that hyper-polished unintentioniality and subtle uncanny hollow “wrongness” that generated images do.

I just sat through my first fully AI-generated presentation. The content was as bland and straight down the middle as possible. The slides were all generated by a standard design - a mix of text blocks, bullets, fonts, colors.

The whole thing was packed with information and completely worthless. I’m 100% convinced that before too long we’re all going to be allergic to this low effort crap, and craving actual people with an actual point of view.

This hasn’t been my wife’s experience at all. She manually writes all her content, but uses AI images as sizzlers for the scenes (fan fic for popular shows). Short of getting the actors together for a million bucks, she’d be hard pressed to make these scenes a reality. It’s also supposed to be aspirational, like “what if the tv cast got back together for another season hey?” I think the average person just doesn’t really notice.

She’s had to figure out where the line is though. She tried using ElevenLabs to dictate her scripts, thinking it’d make things more convenient for her fans, and that lost her subscribers because they seemingly disliked the more obvious use of AI.

I recently complained to the marketing team about an AI generated image used on our website main dashboard. I described everything that was wrong with the image the more you stared at it. That if I was a customer, I would feel that if they are ok to show a low quality image there, what does it means to the products I'm buying.

Their first reaction was to say they didn't see any problem with the image, then they changed it for an abstract image that I couldn't tell if it was AI or not, which is a huge improvement.

I thought I was alone in feeling this way, but turns out people from the sales team told me privately that they were happy I had spoken up.

Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people it's wasting people's time and disrespectful. If you couldn't otherwise write it yourself for whatever reason it's best not to until you can.

Same, I tend to assume it is a sign that AI is used across the board.

But please keep it coming. I need to spend less time idly browsing and the growing preponderance of AI is helping push me in the direction I want to go. My time spent on “social media” has dropped significantly over recent months.

When I was working on a post recently, I rediscovered that it is actually fun to draw. Much more fun than debating with an AI tool to generate an image for me. And given the time I already spent on the subject matter, the effort was not that much more. I can recommend drawing on paper. You can correct mistakes after scanning.

This is not surprising. Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot. Humans assign quality relative to themselves.

A chess game between to bots is boring, no matter how strong the bots are. Humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.

The same goes for your business. Your AI “art” isn’t eye catching, at first glance it’s lazy. A longer glance it’s unsettling. We’re heading for a really boring period in graphic design.

Part of the problem is many bloggers think an image is required for every post. This is reinforced by algorithms which favor such posts, and drives bloggers to the easiest/fastest sources of free images.

The "featured image" in Wordpress is what gets shown on the index page, in shared social posts, and other contexts. And certainly, the algorithms favor such posts over pure text posts, even if the text content in the spartan post is far better.

There are other factors at play, too. Many bloggers are lazy, some are severely time constrained, a few are fearful of legal repercussions associated with copying images off the Internet, and a majority are creatively or technically incapable of making their own images to include on a personal blog post.

"I’d rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image."

Interesting because I'm seeing tons of YouTube channels using AI generated stick figure animations with AI voice overlays to trick people into thinking it's not AI generated.

Your one-short-paragraph blog post with a shallow personal preference discourages me from reading your blog.

There was zero depth to it.

“AI-generated images discourage me from reading” is a statement that’s true for me too, albeit for different reasons than offered in this post. For me, it’s the same kind of thing as “reading the text of your slides out loud”, or repeating the contention in both the introduction and conclusion.

The point of repetition is to reinforce understanding by approaching the same place from different directions, so the reader can pin down your idea at the intersection of these various thrusts. Multiple arrows from roughly the same place going in roughly the same direction don’t constrain the expressed idea, instead they just make it fuzzier.

So much this, blogs add an image for the sake of having an image. At this point it would be much better to just have a random dog or a cat pic, it is as relevant to your blog post as your random generated thing, but I'd prefer seeing a random happy pup.

And if you generated a pic I suppose you also generated your post, so I'm way less likely to pay attention to it.

I've recently started doing crude drawings on my reMarkable when needing something like explainer diagrams. It looks like a toddler did it, but, you know what? It works. I just stopped feeling weird about it.

Pen-type input systems are pretty cheap these days (no need to go reMarkable, I just use it because I have one.) It's not a super frequent need but having something of that type in general I'd consider valuable enough to spend the money.

This has been a frequent problem on fiction writing on royal road. Author promises that they don't use AI to write and then proceed to use AI to generate the cover for the series. They might be telling the truth, but I am not going to spend the time to figure it out for myself. They are really shooting themselves in the foot. A shitty MS paint cover would be less off putting.

Genre images are frequently used to give a post an aura, as a kind of decoration and serves no other purpose than that. Then there are the images that does not quite fit in, that gives that AI ick. Few, if anyone, like them. They demonstrate lack of effort and demand your attention anyway. An imbalance in the force most can immediately sense. There needs to be some originality, some original thought or expression, a creative threshold needs to be passed. Which tools were used to create an image is not important, it is the who and why that is.

Some content creators are too focussed on their work that they might not have noticed the debate going on online about AI-generated images and all they wanted was a cool image for their content. They might not have known that they walked into a hornet's nest.... but they will find out soon enough. Should they have gone down the alternative route, where they spend time and money hiring someone to do it... who will probably use AI anyways. Telling someone not to use AI is like telling someone to not drive and instead take a horse and buggy (circa 1920).

I'd rather read a blog post that includes relevant and decently made illustrations of the topic at hand (explanatory graphics etc) rather than just a wall of text. Makes no difference if these are drawn by hand or using X software or an LLM. But that's just me.

Finally. Same effect with stock imagery. I like using a creative imagery. Hacky looking tuis like sl or pipes.sh. They have some eyecandy and make my blogs have a uniform style.

The moment I see anything LLM-generated it's an instant close tab.

Correction: Whenever you can tell it's an AI image, it discourages you

I used Claude to generate technical SVGs (which are verifiable correct) because I wasn't going to take the time to draw the grid/arrows/etc.

A while back I had the same feeling and hypothesised about a "nutriscore" for AI content in media:

https://disclosure.launchbowl.com/ https://launchbowl.com/ai_nutriscore

I think AI images can enhance a blog article as long as the reader is fully aware and trusting that it's just the auxiliary material to the blog has been generated, not the main body of value.

Agree but how many times are the same articles and opinions reaching the top. It feels like we’re in a loop and it’s boring me out reading the same thing over and over and over again.

I have the same reaction with AI generated YouTube thumbnails. Something in the back of my mind immediately goes "it's probably low quality content" and I'm less likely to click.

What if my blog is mostly about AI generated images? :P

Couldn't agree more - down to the shitty ms paint recommendation

Same with YouTube thumbnails for me. If it is obviously some exaggerated image nothing like what is in the video then i ask youtube to not recommend them. I should just stick to subscriptions but fishing gets me sometimes.

Not all of us can afford to hire illustrators for every blog entry, and while an MS Paint squiggle might suit this blog's author's tastes, I can sympathize with anyone who might prefer something more sophisticated.

I don't see what the problem is with AI images, if some thought has been put into the image itself and if it's relevant in some way. I'd far rather see something playful and on-topic than the generic stock images littering blogs previously or some random example of the writer's photography with little connection to the article.

But really, whatever I like or don't like is besides the point. The blog using AI images isn't my blog. And if I was one of the blog authors who've sent this author into full prig-mode, I'd say to him, "No worries, Nelson. Have a happy life." I'd wager the blog author's own life wouldn't be any happier for bowing to the sensibilities of the Nelsons of this world.

And then there's people that use the AI-generated images to intentionally drive away the people that don't like the pics and AI so as to cultivate a reader base of like-minded people who are ok with using AI

These are all symptoms of the adjustment period following a disruptive technology.

Eventually it'll be perfectly normal to use AI-generated content (and use AI to summarize it), and nobody will bat an eye.

Is this about technical blogs where the image is either of technical nature or something else?

I'd think in the former case it doesn't matter and it's mostly the text I care about to be interesting and personal. I don't read non technical blogs so I don't know what if ai images are a turnoff.

IMHO AI-generated images are not the problem; The low effort people put in to generating them and selecting which image to go with is the problem.

Spend some time on it. Find your own style.

I use AI-themed images for the opener to my blog. It's typically a steampunk robot image that is not related to the topic of the post.

The actual content is written by me. If there are any code samples that were AI-generated, I'll call them out as such.

I don't think the internet as we know it is going to survive generative AI.

Before, the simple existence of the content of some basic level of quality was a strong signal of effort, which corresponds strongly to value. If it's there, it's worth reading.

Now, the existence of content of a basic level of quality signals nothing. It might have some value, but it's much more likely it's useless AI slop.

This principle -- if it's there it's probably worth taking a look at -- undergirded so much of system of creation, discovery, and sharing that made the internet special -- blogs, open-source, posts, comments.

It allowed the gatekeepers, middlemen, guided channels, and tolls to be removed from the creation, enjoyment, sharing, and consumption of content.

I'm worried we're going to have to go back, just to get away from the avalanche of crap people are using AI to produce at crazy rate.

This seems temporary. AI generated images will become the norm for many applications. Today we wonder whether a model in an advertisement is real or generated, 5 years from know this wont even be an interesting thing to consider.

In many contexts, images are meant to illustrate a point. The human becomes the gatekeeper of generated content. The question becomes: does this picture illustrate the point I want to make. If so, you are adding your human approved stamp to the genrated output.

Indeed - instead of pointless hero images, now we have pointless ai-generated hero images.

100%. if I see AI slop images or videos I just click off, it's become almost automatic for me now.

I'm not gonna spend my mental bandwidth on figuring out if the thing is worth reading/whatever and that somehow the author just didn't realize that it's a net negative

Have you seen Midjourney 8.2?

Pretty soon, you will not be able to tell.

What you really mean is "obvious AI-generated images".

I think the issue is we all have read a bit into a AI article before realizing it is one and realize foolishly that you have been reading drivel.

The original prompts might have had something interesting to say, but it is so layered with filler and platitudes that it is just a waste.

After being burned enough times, we hunt around for signals that an article is about to waste our time.

Not all articles with AI images are LLM written, but almost all LLM written articles have AI images.

The author is telling you a hueristic is that people are using, and for this person here, I am totally doing it.

A picture of a napkin doodle at this point is superior.

Eh. I tend to use stock photo stuff. Even easier than AI (and most stockhouses are now using AI, themselves). If it's important to the story, I'll generally generate it, myself (I tend to use OmniGraffle a lot). I'm quite capable of making my own images.

The biggest thing, for me, is provenance. I sometimes get amazed at how people just grab any image they want, and slap it into their blog. There's a whole class of scammer, that goes around spamming fake "we're gonna sue you" letters to sites (I have gotten them, for images that I know are completely clear of obligation). If the image really was ripped off, then they won't be scammers, sending the emails.

I'd rather someone use an AI-generated image; especially if it's just "window dressing," than they put themselves into legal jeopardy, by pirating images.

That’s very rich coming from a person that uses monospaced font for a blog.

My my knee jerk reaction is to agree, I really hate the obvious looking AI images, though I suspect ultimately it comes down to having good taste.

As much as I like to be on the anti AI bandwagon, for which there are plenty of good reasons. Some people use the tool (like any tool) well, to compliment their work.

Eg. this author uses great images to accompany their articles (except for one which is obviously AI), its hard to know if they are real or not but they support the text. https://tuhat.net/@jesusrrodriguez/

Regarding businesses, I think the use of bland stock images made most corporate sites awful years ago. AI is just accelerating and making it easier for the rest of us to create the lazy heartless "content" that has been so common from the corporate world.

Same thing with dark mode.

The main problem is, those AI generated images are only so jarring because they're so obvious.

As time goes on they'll be harder to spot. We're going to need a new way of determining quality as such obvious signals have a limited shelf-life.

Not that AI generated images are always bad. They are perfectly acceptable if used for (not an exclusive list): small separators between sections in large blog posts, or other decorative features; used to illustrate things for which no real image exists (as long as it's labelled as an impression/reconstruction/etc.). They're only really a negative signal if they're used dishonestly, to claim something existed when it didn't, etc.

It just makes me wonder what else in your content is AI-generated. Just sows a little seed of distrust.

The goal of someone putting actual ideas out into the world should be to establish trust, not create questions about whether the ideas are theirs or plagiarized from ChatGPT.

If I do it, I make sure it's a good image, not just slop that I prompt and paste in, because I can. And on rare occasions when I do, it's on my own gaming system with Stable Diffusion so I can have as many takes as I like, fairly quickly.

Never do it because you can - that is a no-effort thing.

I find images are good for speed-reading; they convey information that otherwise would require much more time-consuming attention. I'm significantly more likely to read a long article, after skimming it, if it contains contextual images.

Personally, I'm okay with AI generated images as long as it's not obvious or slop: For me, a carefully-prompted image is on par with a carefully chosen photo, carefully chosen diagram, ect.

I also hold blog entries to a lower standard than professional content: I'm much more likely (after skimming) to read an imperfect non-professional blog entry than (after skimming) imperfect professional content. (And professional content is where I expect images that are higher quality than AI prompting.)

I think there's a difference here between low-effort AI slop and something made with the help of AI. I always wonder how many AI images and articles we consume without realizing they were made by AI just because a human actually spent the time on making the AI create a good output.

If a content is making a positive impact on your life, your mental health, your family's well being, your general outlook, your future, would it matter if is from AI or from human?

what percentage of readers does it bother though? If 2% of readers just refuse anything built/generated with AI then are they worth accommodating? It sounds crazy but i distinctly remember people slamming their fist on the desk saying they will always prefer to use the card catalog at the library instead of Google when search was really taking off. At some point you just have to move on.

Would photography discourage OP from reading a blog? Should I hand-paint my imagery? If I am the type of person that would use a camera, then maybe I'd be the type of person to hire a ghostwriter.

Weirdly I might slightly prefer your AI-generated image if some thought is put into it to entirely average soulless and tasteless corporate stock photo. You know multicultural team or photogenic enough person doing some meaningless staged task. Those have no chance to adding anything to the text. Same really goes for clip art.

At least with AI there might be some thought or idea behind it. Even it is lazy slop.

This might be true for technical users, average users increasingly don't care about AI images and even AI prose.

You can't cater to every single person out there. The author comes as quite entitled.

If you're writing about something which exists in reality, then it is possible to take a photo of it. If you're writing about something which doesn't exist in reality, then it shouldn't be accompanied by any image.

Stock photos or AI generated images are always wrong. Real photos, no matter how bland, convey information from reality and are always right.

OK.

I agree. The human experience is the only thing that matters. If AI tries to replace or supersede that, then it's bad AI.

Only if it has that AI look. What you don’t realize is that you can generate images that don’t have “the look” rather easily if you have an eye for it.

For me the breaking point for images in texts was stock photos.

Before that, when there was a photo in the article it was a frame from a footage from the event or the photo, or the schematic of the device the article was about or something. Something relevant to that particular piece of information.

But then everything became click-bait factory illustrated by images that fit the mood.

AI images don't make it worse. Don't make it better. But they might if they get better at relevant infographics. For now they aren't good enough because they rely on a human for understanding of what are they to depic and humans often don't care enough.

I stopped reading blog posts/tweets that have been AI generated.

If I don't recognize that it's AI and it helps me understand the article I am fine with it. Generative AI images don't need to be slop even if most of them are.

I find them very interesting and they make me more likely to remember your blog. I was reading that Gas Town post yesterday and despite all the backlash about the whimsical world and the ai images being sloppy and wrong, they still stuck in my brain more than anything else I’ve read this year.

The author say they’d prefer Microsoft paint images but actually I don’t think this is true of most audiences. People have the ability to make terrible paint images for decades and they’ve never caught anyone’s attention in a positive way, it’s not going to start now.

OP’s blog of white text on black background will be forgotten quickly. If I visit it again, I will have no recollection of ever having visited. I’m not saying they need to use AI, but to oppose AI with the opposite —- minimal design or even intentionally crappy design — will not have the intended effect of communicating “this is quality human-authored content”, it will just be forgettable.

Belongs on Luddite News

Cheap AI image generation is a miracle and this article is dumb af

you are but one person

Agree. Ai art looks like garbage.

If you use images on your blog, even if you are scrupulous about sourcing them, purchase licenses, or go by the same low-resolution "fair use" rules that Wikipedia does, you will get several letters a year from law firms claiming they represent a client who owns the right to that photo.

Rather than wasting time sorting all these out when the images are there mostly to break up a wall of text, some blogs simply use a few AI images. This way if those letters come, they can simply put them in the bin.

I don't object to this use of AI images at all.

Ok? That's nice.

As someone who adds AI generated images on blog entries (a single context-appropriate genAI image that is used for OpenGraph sharing), I just do not give a shit if some people have opinions like this. Jog on?

The vast majority of bloggers in 2026 do so for their own edification, to their own preferences and choices. Whining about what they do is decided a beggars being choosers thing.

From [0] https://nelson.cloud/about/#skills

> Other: Claude Code

Then the author said:

> I know there are plenty of things you can roast my blog for but at least you know for a fact you’re getting the thoughts of a real human being and not some LLM.

So it is OK for you to use AI generation tools like Claude Code and likely using it in your blog or using it to generate code, but it isn't OK for you to see someone else using AI to generate images?

With the above already stated, that means the author cannot guarantee that not a single use of AI was used in their blog at all given that we know they use Claude.

Why preach fake principles with virtue signalling and then break your own standards in your own blog post?

I don’t have a problem with ai generated media in blogs at all. Nobody is going to take the time to hand draw a piece of art for a blog that takes them less than an hour to write. Pictures speak a thousand words and serve as a great intro to a blog post. Embrace the future.

"I’d rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image."

The problem is, there are also AI generated MS Paint drawings that you can't tell is AI. We are only noticing the AI images that are in an 'AI' style. The AI tools allow you to make images you can't tell is AI.

Clearly this was written by AI

niceeee

> I'd rather see a shitty Microsoft Paint drawing as opposed to some AI image.

So spot on!

And, with that Paint drawing, it'll probably illustrate what you mean and at the same time we establish some kind of trust; I'll know this is not just mere AI slop.

Fuck it, I love em

meh - you're just acting old.

young people will get used to GenAI as a style and it'll become the new normal.

you can see it in the flowery AI writing that's proliferating into email and docs.

What I read , my western ego is so big I want to place my opinion everywhere possible .

Image is content , ai can generate art level images and an obvious slop . To read or or not is absolutely up to reader , not someone’s entitled opinion .

Still better than AI generated text.

No one is reading your blog anyway, they are looking for the video.

I share the author's sentiment.

But I have another hatred:

    Monospace fonts in blogs.