Recently, I saw a post on Lemmy of an article that piqued my interest, at least enough to try to validate the information in it. When I followed the link, I was greeted with a clearly AI generated image (it showed trump with an extra finger).

I immediately lost trust in the article and made a comment regarding that. (Link)

But the reaction to this was surprising to me. I got a response stating that the author has a background of being an established writer and reporter, as well as received a lot of downvotes. However, no one responded to my points on the use of AI.

My thoughts are that if you are making money on something, then you need to avoid AI when possible and reasonable.

What’s going on here? Am I wrong and this is somehow an acceptable use of AI?

[Edit] side note of something that that just occurred to me: don’t go to that thread to manipulate the votes or start ““brigading”” against it for the AI. I just wanted to discuss it here. Thanks.

  • BertramDitore@lemm.eeEnglish
    15·
    4 days ago

    I agree with you and your immediate loss of trust when seeing ai-generated images, especially in news articles. My view is that if you are an established media company, then it’s your responsibility to pay for legal illustrations/images. Whether that be hiring an illustrator to make something from scratch or buying the rights to an existing image, participating in that market keeps creatives employed and keeps the quality of the art high, or a least not filled with seven-fingered people. Once we give up on artists creating new works and rely only on remixing drivel without permission, we’ll lose quite a lot of creativity, and people can obviously tell the difference.

    I’m a little more ambivalent about independent journalists or newly spun-up media companies that are still getting their bearings using image generators, but frankly my impression whenever I see one even on a small independent site is still “yuck, no image would be better than this crap.”

    So yeah, there are definitely more important things to be upset about when it comes to AI being shoved down our throats, but this also bothers me a lot.