I don't think it signifies any of those things. This is all new stuff. Some people have decided to offload image-creation to machines because what they care about is the text.

This stuff you say it signifies, it says more about you than them.

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michaelt a day ago | parent | next [-]

Some use of hero images by bloggers is a deliberate style choice, to emulate the norms of professional journalism.

A lot of traditional news outlets have a style rule that every article must have an image. Look at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.economist.com etc - every article has an image. Even a report on something highly abstract - "BP reports record profits" - will be illustrated with a photograph of some BP-branded fuel pumps. Stories on things like cybersecurity and inflation get generic images like snippets of blurry computer code, banknotes etc.

Some bloggers feel their blog is improved by adopting the style of professional journalism, and (among other things) put an image on every article. Even if for a programming blog good lead images are hard to come by.

Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use. They have rules on everything from illustrating one rocket launch with a photo of another to posing the subjects to colour-correcting images to creating multi-image collages. So I don't imagine we'll see many AI-generated images in traditional news outlets any time soon.

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ghaff a day ago | parent | next [-]

People who know more about the topic than I do will argue for a default image for an online article for SEO and other reasons. Online pubs I've done stuff for would usually take a good/relevant photo if you have one. But, otherwise, would generally use some fairly generic stock graphic from some service they subscribed to.

Same goes for book covers. You probably need something unless you want to look really generic and cheap. But I'm mostly not going to pay a designer hundreds+ of dollars for a cover of an independently published book. I have had a former colleague who is actually good with this sort of thing do it in the past. I've also done a crappy job myself, done it in conjunction with a publisher (for whom I had the supply the cover image), and, yes, used generative AI/Photoshop.

	▲	Gigachad 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Someone paying hundreds for a good cover design is a signifier that a lot of effort went in to the book and the cover reflects that. An AI cover signifies that this is a quick rush out the door cash grab book that likely isn’t worth reading.

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inigyou a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was a thing about a year ago where YouTubers were holding lapel mics in their hands to show they don't really know what they're doing, on purpose, to differentiate themselves from the big players.

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graemep a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use.

I seem to recall many instances of the use of incorrect photos, and the earliest I heard of was in the The Guardian in the 1980s before the general decline in media quality and standards.

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michaelt a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, the current standards did arise out of a lot of questionable behaviour.

It's awfully tempting for a war photojournalist to pose the group of tearful women in front of the bombed-out building across town. Or for the celeb gossip reporter to collage together two photos without making it clear it's a collage. Or for the person colour-correcting a photo of a divisive figure to lighten or darken their skin.

And the resulting rules are complex and at times judgement-based, because posing subjects is allowed in some circumstances, collages are sometimes allowed, some colour adjustment is allowed, and so on.

Still, serious journalists aren't going to be illustrating their articles about US-Iran negotiations with chatgpt any time soon.

	▲	inigyou a day ago \| parent [-]
		are there any serious journalists any more? If so, who?

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CM30 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I recall some rather awkward/amusing examples of this in media reports on certain video games. It's better now, but at one point, about half the featured images for articles about the game Super Mario World used some random pic from DeviantArt to represent the game (despite said art looking nothing like the original title), while a similar number of articles about Super Mario 64 represented it with a screenshot of the ROM hack Super Mario Star Road.

No-one knows exactly how said images ended up getting this sort of usage. Presumably some random journalist was on Google Images one day, come across pics that looked vaguely like what they remembered the games to look like, and just kinda went with it.

I also remember quite a few cases where fan-made box art mockups got accidentally used as the pictures of the real thing, and when the BBC used a logo from Halo to represent a real-life organisation.

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bee_rider a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, everyone knows the best content is on a professor’s site from the 90’s, with no images. Maybe some figures, but if so, they should look like they were printed, physically cut out, and then scanned. Bonus points if the background of the image absolutely does not match the color of the webpage.

So now we have this low-effort image generation tool. At least it doesn’t indicate that the author wasted a substantial amount of time looking at pictures. Still a silly waste of time, but at least it is a small one.

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qlm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you don't care about the images then don't have images.

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duplessitous a day ago | parent | next [-]

No one ever said they didn't want images, this is a non-sequiturs

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mejutoco a day ago | parent [-]

> Some people have decided to offload image-creation to machines because what they care about is the text.

	▲	duplessitous a day ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for providing the text that reaffirms my statement. If you have the time to copy and past someone else's text, you should take the time to actually read it

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intrasight a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Or just have a podcast so that you don't have the option to have images.

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pluralmonad a day ago | parent [-]

It bothers my brain when a longtime followed podcast changes their cover image. You conditioned my brain for years to a certain image and pattern and now you change it? How dare you!

	▲	intrasight a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's so weird that they all seem to update at once - which makes me think that it's my podcast player that's periodically checking. But that sort of an opaque process for me since it's not my area of technology.

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elictronic a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it looks like cheap generic crap it’s probably cheap generic crap. Most AI imagery looks like cheap generic crap.

It’s flooded the market to the point average users are starting to turn away. Look different or be relegated to obscurity.

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bonoboTP a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's about experience visiting many sites and spotting a correlation. There is a very bottom of slop, the equivalent of the chumbox from earlier. But on the higher end it may be more like you say. If there are other indicators of quality, I wouldn't penalize it for AI use. It's like having lots of piercings and torn clothes and tattoos. You may be a genius scholar who is kinda into this as a hobby or you may be an actual lowlife who can't hold down a job and gets into trouble with the law all the time.

People will always make snap judgments, you can't inspect every website in detail. So if you use AI, make sure there are some other signals of quality.