Non-artists: please gently let your well-intentioned niche blogger friends know that generating an AI illustration for their posts is not a harmless novelty. There are so many sources for free, eye-pleasing, not-environmentally-rapacious images. Creative Commons licenses, public domain art history.
Damn Right!
Wikimedia Commons is one of the largest and best-curated collections around. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Though that illustrates why AI exploded so much. Judge Beryl Howell ruled all AI art is in the public domain (because gradients are magic? it's a mess) and now suddenly public domain art is whatever you can imagine, not the surviving samples of what someone 95 years ago came up with.
And if you’re doing anything remotely interesting don’t underestimate the value of an “amateurish” piece of art. That’s what I use for my very much blogging images. Self-created or open license work.
Folks need to hear it from peers who aren’t visual art creators, who run the risk of seeming shrill or defensive or making it too much of a “you hurt my feelings” thing rather than a simple PSA. We’re all catching up to this stuff!
Big fan of Unsplash and Pexels, which both have free-with-attribution stock photography that looks really, really good.
I'm doing a really good Udemy lesson at the moment in programming and the only trash thing about it is he uses all these fucking AI generated pictures. They're freaky and I hate them.
I keep seeing this everywhere. I would much rather bloggers use nothing at all if they can't find a good image.
also, it’s really fun to dig into public domain resources to illustrate your blog posts!
I've pointed that out to several authors and bloggers and they've mostly ignored me... Or blocked me. There's a particular author with an author help website that has AI everywhere... And she deleted my comments talking about AI. I won't visit her stuff anymore.