Ugh, this immediately drives home the realization that representative images are soon going to be devalued and useless, to the point that we'll all be ignoring them soon. Possibly even stripping them with ad blockers or similar tools.
I actually think it's really awesome to be able to do this with a series of blog posts, and even if you look past the stylistic inconsistencies and oddities, this particular usage is good and adds value.
Which is kind of the problem. Relatively low cost, currently high benefit? It's going to be driven into the ground.
We've seen this over and over again. Some reliable form of signal, or of value, becomes inexpensive enough to produce that it gets commoditized, monetized, and weaponized against us all.
Email is a major productivity advance that gives a low-friction way of communicating for mutual gain? Well, now we're drowning in spam and phishing attempts and people won't read random unsolicited messages—if they even make it pass the automated filters. Same for text messages. Bold images and lettering used to be good for highlighting and accentuating important information. Now we don't see them, even if they make it past our ad blockers, because the neural networks living in our skulls know to filter them out as negative-value advertisements.
The same thing will happen here. Nearly all blogs will soon be sprouting cutesy images to go along with the posts. Initially, many of them will be useful and add value, suggesting a metaphor or analogy or simply providing a visual anchor to make the content more memorable.
But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll have the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have some image because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops it's too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just added for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the absence of an image is a good signal for content quality, we're at -1%!
(If you put work into the prompt and curate carefully, it will still be a net positive to your content. But it won't matter for long in terms of traffic/engagement, because everyone will be mentally ignoring it.)
> Email is a major productivity advance that gives a low-friction way of communicating for mutual gain? Well, now we're drowning in spam and phishing attempts and people won't read random unsolicited messages—if they even make it pass the automated filters.
Actually, in my experience, and the experience of most of the people in my life, email is a valuable tool that we consistently use, and rarely have any problems with. Spam is a minor inconvenience , at most. (And certainly less of one than the overwhelming number of ads on Facebook.) Phishing is almost non-existent, and very easy to ignore when it pops up a couple of times a year.
In fact, without email, I think the internet would be pretty horrible.
People love to criticize email, but it's actually quite great. It's distributed, low cost, easy to use, and nearly universal. It has mature tools that make the obvious problems (such as spam) not really a problem. And most email senders actually make it easy to unsubscribe. I regularly subscribe/unsubscribe to email lists -- and it's nice having control over what comes into my email inbox.
Email, frankly, is what more of the internet should be like...!
> But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll have the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have some image because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops it's too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just added for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the absence of an image is a good signal for content quality, we're at -1%!
Too late. It already started happening a while ago. Tons of blogs with annoying animated gifs and now browsers have the ability to block them.
Yep. My analogy for this kind of effect is McDonald’s (and other fast or prepackaged food). Fast food never eclipsed good food because, well, it’s not that good. But it spreads. It’s just the result of unfettered capitalism (tech is no different in this regard to any other industry).
But it’s also a culture thing…like people trying to convince us that mediocre stuff is good or cool. I mean in this case it’s new because a machine is doing it, but what are OpenAI’s real economic motivations behind all their press releases I wonder…?
I actually think it's really awesome to be able to do this with a series of blog posts, and even if you look past the stylistic inconsistencies and oddities, this particular usage is good and adds value.
Which is kind of the problem. Relatively low cost, currently high benefit? It's going to be driven into the ground.
We've seen this over and over again. Some reliable form of signal, or of value, becomes inexpensive enough to produce that it gets commoditized, monetized, and weaponized against us all.
Email is a major productivity advance that gives a low-friction way of communicating for mutual gain? Well, now we're drowning in spam and phishing attempts and people won't read random unsolicited messages—if they even make it pass the automated filters. Same for text messages. Bold images and lettering used to be good for highlighting and accentuating important information. Now we don't see them, even if they make it past our ad blockers, because the neural networks living in our skulls know to filter them out as negative-value advertisements.
The same thing will happen here. Nearly all blogs will soon be sprouting cutesy images to go along with the posts. Initially, many of them will be useful and add value, suggesting a metaphor or analogy or simply providing a visual anchor to make the content more memorable.
But they'll quickly become expected and necessary and we'll have the usual race to the bottom. Everyone will have some image because it boosts engagement by 8%... wait now 6%... oops it's too common, we're awash in crappy irrelevant images just added for the boost, which is down to 2%... oh crap, now the absence of an image is a good signal for content quality, we're at -1%!
(If you put work into the prompt and curate carefully, it will still be a net positive to your content. But it won't matter for long in terms of traffic/engagement, because everyone will be mentally ignoring it.)