Nelson Figueroa’s short, sharp essay about a “growing hatred” for AI-generated images on blogs — not because of the images themselves, but because they make him wonder whether the surrounding text is AI-generated to some extent. He’s disappointed specifically when the images appear on blogs run by individuals: corporate blogs are expected to look like that, indie blogs shouldn’t. The argument is really about signaling and authenticity: he’d rather see a “shitty Microsoft Paint drawing” than a polished AI image, because even a bad hand-made graphic is proof that a human was actually there. His own blog may be roastable in plenty of ways, he admits, but at least readers know for a fact they’re getting the thoughts of a real human being and not an LLM. The piece is a small, practical plea — if you run a personal blog, avoid AI-generated images — and a reminder that in an AI-saturated web, the cheapest human artifacts are becoming the most valuable trust signals. Related reading: Gruhn’s argument that relaying LLM output verbatim makes you a “meat proxy” — both essays are about preserving proof of human authorship.
AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog — Nelson Figueroa
An AI image on a personal blog is a trust signal that fails — it makes readers wonder if the words were machine-written too.