AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog

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.

Fair enough. I dislike word-expansion AI text so I get it. When I write on my blog, part of it is as memory like a diary for myself and I find that I can create these images that help remember the scene well. As much as I'd like people to read my blog, I get that they have preferences, and if many decide against then that's their prerogative.

Here are two examples with AI images from Nano Banana:

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-20/Drops_of_Wat...

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-07-23/Sixtless_in_...

I think I'll probably keep doing what I'm doing there.

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.

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’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 know it is overused on tweeter - but all this really seems to be about status. Like Robin Hanson said - people read stuff because it seems prestigious.

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 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.

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 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.

The problem with illustrations is that AI fills in so much nonsense, it is difficult to tell of the picture’s thousand words which ones were intended.

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

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.

"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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.