Figure 1: A diverse collection of keys (generated with AI)
Fuck it. The image is unnecessary, ugly and my reading experience is made worse by its presence. I’ll follow the recommendations from the cryptography blog with the beautiful furry art instead.
That key image literally broke my pattern recognition (as many GenAI images do) do this point of my eyes unable to focus on the actual page and had to print to text and read it that way. Only other time I have had such a strong reaction was when playing around with an eyetracker and using the gazepoint to warp the mouse cursor. A really bad idea and I think I know how a cat feels around laser pointers now.
That aside, the recommendations are solid and the writeup good (as expected from trailofbits).
I personally just glazed over it to continue reading.
Didn’t notice it till I scrolled up again because I saw “figure 2” and thought..
“Hmm what was “figure 1” I don’t remember…oh! It wasn’t important.. Oh that’s AI generated? Okay”
IMO it’s a pointless addition, whether AI generated or not.
I don’t think we should blame (only) the authors, but also the ecosystem, because at the moment every “social site” practically requires an image to be shown as the “snapshot” of a shared link, thus the following HTML meta-tag which happens to use the same image as the first one in the article:
What happens if you don’t include such an image for each and every page of your site? Technically nothing, the social site just puts a blank image, a placeholder, or a scaled-up variant of the site’s favicon. However in practical terms, I bet the link is downgraded by “the algorithm”.
Thus, just ignore the blurb images, as I do almost every other site out there, as they are a requirement in today’s web-conomy.
I get you, but it could also be any image, any image at all. I often just use vacation photos. There is no requirement that it be a distracting bad AI image. The flippant use of an AI image is a strong quality indicator that implies the rest of the post will be garbage too. Better for the authors to have put in some effort.
I get you, but it could also be any image, any image at all. I often just use vacation photos.
Another piece of the web-conomy machine you are dismissing is “copyright” and “licensing”. Sure, for you blog, you can use your own vacation photos, because it’s not like you’re going to sue yourself for using them; but this is a company’s blog, written by a company employee (or contractor as it’s most often the case), thus he can’t use photos from his own vacation, because then he also has to transfer copyright, or at least license that image for the company to use, thus lawyers. Another option is to use some stock photo, but that means money, and it’s not like a bland stock-photo image is better than a LLM regurcitation. Thus, the cheapest solution is to make the LLM spit out some blurb image that has no copyright, thus no legal entanglements.
The flippant use of an AI image is a strong quality indicator that implies the rest of the post will be garbage too.
I can assure you that the post text is not garbage. It has a few good points that are expressed in plain words, instead of the crypto-highfalutin language other cryptographers use in their blog posts.
No yeah, I agree, the article is fine, it’s just the use of AI slop ruined any first impression, and I can see why many people didn’t bother to read any further. It probably did seem cheap to the authors at the time, and that’s a shame.
most CMSes allow to configure a site-wide fallback for og:image if the article does not have one. It can be a properly sized logo, or a photo of the author. If Wordpress does not support this, I guess there’s a plugin to implement it.
less than one minute of searching through unsplash surfaced this image of key blanks among many others. It is nicer, free to use (even on commercial websites) and is not built on stolen work.
The intro seemed fine, but I stopped reading at
Fuck it. The image is unnecessary, ugly and my reading experience is made worse by its presence. I’ll follow the recommendations from the cryptography blog with the beautiful furry art instead.
That key image literally broke my pattern recognition (as many GenAI images do) do this point of my eyes unable to focus on the actual page and had to print to text and read it that way. Only other time I have had such a strong reaction was when playing around with an eyetracker and using the gazepoint to warp the mouse cursor. A really bad idea and I think I know how a cat feels around laser pointers now.
That aside, the recommendations are solid and the writeup good (as expected from trailofbits).
I personally just glazed over it to continue reading.
Didn’t notice it till I scrolled up again because I saw “figure 2” and thought..
“Hmm what was “figure 1” I don’t remember…oh! It wasn’t important.. Oh that’s AI generated? Okay”
IMO it’s a pointless addition, whether AI generated or not.
I don’t think we should blame (only) the authors, but also the ecosystem, because at the moment every “social site” practically requires an image to be shown as the “snapshot” of a shared link, thus the following HTML meta-tag which happens to use the same image as the first one in the article:
What happens if you don’t include such an image for each and every page of your site? Technically nothing, the social site just puts a blank image, a placeholder, or a scaled-up variant of the site’s favicon. However in practical terms, I bet the link is downgraded by “the algorithm”.
Thus, just ignore the blurb images, as I do almost every other site out there, as they are a requirement in today’s web-conomy.
I get you, but it could also be any image, any image at all. I often just use vacation photos. There is no requirement that it be a distracting bad AI image. The flippant use of an AI image is a strong quality indicator that implies the rest of the post will be garbage too. Better for the authors to have put in some effort.
Another piece of the web-conomy machine you are dismissing is “copyright” and “licensing”. Sure, for you blog, you can use your own vacation photos, because it’s not like you’re going to sue yourself for using them; but this is a company’s blog, written by a company employee (or contractor as it’s most often the case), thus he can’t use photos from his own vacation, because then he also has to transfer copyright, or at least license that image for the company to use, thus lawyers. Another option is to use some stock photo, but that means money, and it’s not like a bland stock-photo image is better than a LLM regurcitation. Thus, the cheapest solution is to make the LLM spit out some blurb image that has no copyright, thus no legal entanglements.
I can assure you that the post text is not garbage. It has a few good points that are expressed in plain words, instead of the crypto-highfalutin language other cryptographers use in their blog posts.
Unsplash is a site with CC0-licensed images.
No yeah, I agree, the article is fine, it’s just the use of AI slop ruined any first impression, and I can see why many people didn’t bother to read any further. It probably did seem cheap to the authors at the time, and that’s a shame.
This is a very poor excuse for bad behaviour:
og:imageif the article does not have one. It can be a properly sized logo, or a photo of the author. If Wordpress does not support this, I guess there’s a plugin to implement it.