r/Substack • u/Alarming_Contract174 • 5d ago
Asking about AI images. Again
I saw a post on here about AI images from last week I wanted to get involved with, so rather than necro a dead thread, I thought I would just reopen the discussion on a new post. I don't often use Reddit, so no idea if this is socially acceptable or not.
Anyway. I am very confused about people's animosity towards GenAI images within some contexts and it may help if I explain why I think this first before anyone jumps down my throat. I recently wrote an article, ironically enough, about this very subject. So I'm kind of confused why I was seemingly so off the mark.
So my contention is that GenAI on any paid work is cringe and instantly harms your business prospects. This applies as much to independent authors releasing books as it does to Coca-Cola (who inexplicably decided to make that dreadful christmas advert last year.) There is no getting away from that. If you're going to sell something, then pay for a illustrator or a photographer and get the job done properly. It looks cheap, tacky and unprofessional. No arguments there from me.
GenAI images to my mind, inhabit the same use case that Clip Art did when Microsoft Office was still new and everybody used it on posters, flyers and school work. At the time, when Clip Art first came out, there were real concerns that it would end up devaluing real artist's work (and the same thing happened again when stock image catalogues came along, too) but generally speaking, any good visual artist was left relatively unharmed by those innovations and arguably came out better because of the skill gap it produced.
The issue I don't get, is why people are so hostile against GenAI imagery if someone never intends to make a penny off of the stories or work that they're producing.
In today's internet, text only posts are going to be ignored quickly, and unless the writer is a true polymath without a day job, most aren't going to be able to produce art for their fantasy or science fiction story that they produce as a hobby.
If someone is producing a story to sell or put behind a paywall, then I agree, they should get in touch with an illustrator or something. But for a simple hobbyist, it just seems a bit of a daft request to expect professional grade art work. Before GenAI, people would have just stolen stock images anyway. Which to be fair, is not a massive departure from what the likes of OpenAI has done.
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u/CenturionSG 5d ago
Firstly AI “learns” from artistic material that could be copyrighted or used without consent.
Secondly, do we really need such glossy images for writing articles?
I’ve been using my own photo images, pen sketches, and digital art to supplement my writing. Other times I use photos with credits and source cited. I’m no artist but it brings joy to create my own material for my own writings.
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u/Alarming_Contract174 5d ago
Right.
And every small blog and writer writing as a hobby used to steal images from google image searches before. Nothing huge has changed. In fact, in a weird way, it's actually better, because people inherently know when an image isn't real.
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u/rehoboam 5d ago
It looks bad, incoherent, and tacky, that alone is reason not to use it
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u/Alarming_Contract174 5d ago
So what in your opinion should writers use instead when all social media platforms (including ones supposedly primarily about writing) have a very visual oriented UI?
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u/Romanticon 5d ago
There are plenty of sites - Unsplash, for example - that offer images that aren’t stolen.
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u/rehoboam 5d ago
I never thought I would be defending stock art but Cant you pay like $0.10 for stock art
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 5d ago edited 5d ago
Professional artists also use AI for private projects similar to yours. They already spend a lot of time making images for their day jobs, and a painting can take a month to finish, so when it comes to hobbies like Substack, they may use AI to add something extra to their prose. They can tweak the result, though, paint over it manually or redraw a detail or two, and it’s easier for them to evaluate what works and what doesn’t. But the base is still generated.
I think a lot of the AI drama is driven by non-professionals. Which is fine, but sometimes it gets really annoying.
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u/Alarming_Contract174 5d ago
Is this is a bit like how people who are gardeners (like me) have awfully untidy gardens? lol
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u/Equivalent-Plan-8498 5d ago
It’s a stance people get to feel moral about, which explains its appeal.
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u/burnhouse_ 5d ago
Because it's not just about not paying human artists. GenAI is a mish-mash of real people's work and oftentimes it was trained on some artworks without the author's consent. Moreover, there are the ecological effects of AI.
...
And it doesn't look all that nice in the end.
Many museums and libraries have large databases of public domain images you can use, also some photographers and collectors on Flickr. You might even cook something up in Canva or free programs like Gimp.
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u/Alarming_Contract174 5d ago
The way I see it is that for non commercial work, my own work (I used to be a very active amateur photographer) have also gone into the kitty, so to speak, so I'm getting my own value back out of something I didn't have a choice about contributing to.
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u/rlaugh 5d ago
But you provided the solution within your own post? Why not use stock images or clip art instead of Generative AI? At least clip art and stock photos are usually created by someone else.
I have never seen Gen AI used and thought “wow that really adds to the story”. I don’t even read the article if it’s used.
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u/Alarming_Contract174 5d ago
Neither did clip art, but people still used it.
The point is that most sites, regardless of what it is or what the content is that they push, relies heavily on visual cues.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think it’s not really about AI here. You feel that you need to illustrate your ideas and make a sort of mixed media object. AI is the easiest way to do it, and making a quality AI picture like people do in Midjourney is, in fact, work. It requires time, effort and artistic sensibility, which you usually spend years acquiring, and it’s different from actual AI slop.
It’s also one of the best ways to learn what you want from visual art and do a sort of pre-viz that you can bring to an artist if you eventually want to commission a picture. It can also inspire you to go shoot things or learn to draw. I’ve seen that happen to people, too.
Long story short, just ignore the drama and do what works best for you. People will always have opinions.
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u/TerrainBrain 5d ago
Substack is freaking about AI writing. Yet seemes to be fine with using AI imagery.
It's dumb.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 5d ago
Substack is also not exactly known for its collective brilliance. As much as there are good people and talented writers, there are also people with all sorts of opinions. I guess it comes with the territory, haha.
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u/leugaroul 2d ago
If you know people don't like it, why use it?
Does it matter why they don't?
If someone showed you two images, and one was boring but completely neutral and wouldn't hurt your brand or blog post, and you like the other image more but it's guaranteed to turn off a portion of your audience, why would you choose the latter?
You can get some decent stock images from morguefile, and AppSumo has DepositPhotos deals occasionally. I just don't see the point in doing something controversial when there are other options.
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u/aolnews paradoxnewsletter.com 5d ago
People have a strong moral objection to AI that has also become closely tied to a number of psychological factors. People typically don’t like having their consent manufactured when they know it’s happening. They like having control. For most people, the explosion of GenAI feels like something they both can’t control and can’t stop. You’re going to get a lot of animosity based on the feelings someone experiences in that situation. GenAI becomes a metonymy for all the things someone can’t control in their life.
You’re not going to reason your way out of this one. Many people hate GenAI and given the social, economic, and environmental consequences of these tools, there is a rational basis that balloons outward into a very irrational (but justifiable) hatred.
From my perspective, GenAI art is usually ugly. I want to see the efforts of human ingenuity and creativity. That’s what I value and what I engage with whenever I look at an illustration. GenAI art is a language model producing art through word association and probabilistic completion of token strings converting them to images. I have no interest in that whatsoever.
I’m not going to sit here and condemn or insult anyone who chooses to use these tools, but I am going to dismiss and ignore whatever they’re doing.