People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren’t very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn’t familiar with Substack, so their brain just went “random AI slop site, ignore”.
I think that it’s a pity if people write off my SD page because they failed to understand the meaningful illustration I put effort into creating and didn’t, say, check the alt text to see if they were missing something or wonder why such an unusual website would have “AI slop”; and I agree that this may be a case of “things you can’t countersignal”.
However, I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations. I don’t usually write for such readers, and I definitely do not write my Gene Wolfe essays for them!
So unless people can point to something actually bad about the illustration, which makes it fail to satisfy my intent—as opposed to something bad about the readers like being dumb and ignorant and writing it off as “AI slop” when it’s not—then I decline to change it.
People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren’t very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn’t familiar with Substack, so their brain just went “random AI slop site, ignore”.
I think that it’s a pity if people write off my SD page because they failed to understand the meaningful illustration I put effort into creating and didn’t, say, check the alt text to see if they were missing something or wonder why such an unusual website would have “AI slop”; and I agree that this may be a case of “things you can’t countersignal”.
However, I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations. I don’t usually write for such readers, and I definitely do not write my Gene Wolfe essays for them!
So unless people can point to something actually bad about the illustration, which makes it fail to satisfy my intent—as opposed to something bad about the readers like being dumb and ignorant and writing it off as “AI slop” when it’s not—then I decline to change it.