Sure, it's cute to see a Studio Ghibli re-enactment of your blog post but then I'm always left wondering if I'm going to spend more time reading the article than the author took to write it. It kind of ruins my enjoyment of the indieweb if I end up looking suspiciously at dashes. Could this have been a twitter thread with a few photos and the raw prompts instead?

All that being said, I've been trying to work out if this is another thing I should let go. With how outrage-fuelled social media is these days I've been working on being less judgemental of others if it doesn't directly affect me.

20 years ago you could have perfectly civil conversations on forums with people with usernames xXx_ShadowFox69_xXx and typically the contents of their messages was more important than how cringy their signature was. Maybe this is just an unfortunate part of the modern web I should look past, even if I don't like it?

As a case study, there is a Substack I follow with a guy who does original research. I've been following him before he started using AI images and once he started, I noticed that there was attention to detail in his images, in that they were highly relevant and unique to that article, sometimes including humor, and in general, you could tell he had actually thought about the image he posted. In his case, the AI art is mostly neutral for me. It doesn't affect my perception much one way or another.

On the done poorly end of the spectrum, when I go do a blog and every image is in the same style and is some variation of a robot or a person in front of a chalkboard (with the title or thesis on it) teaching other robots or people, I certainly think "Slop!" In that case, I more often feel that images are degrading content that might actually be decent and that no image would be better than this. I don't often come back, though.

But given the pathological groupthink that pervades the "tech industry," I expect to see more and more of them.