Hmmm. Enough people seem to be saying things like this for me to think I should stop having images on my pieces. I think Substack then defaults to my logo which would be OK?

The option to get other kinds of images is not a good one for me. I am so profoundly lacking in any kind of artistic imagination myself that it is recognised as a disability (aphantasia) but one that doesn’t matter at all because my life does not actually require it and I never had it so I don’t miss it. I just make sure my clothes are black and the colour scheme of my home is decided by someone else and it’s fine. When I ran Areo I had an art student picking images after attempts to do so myself always took so long and 1 in 4 attempts resulted in reader comments of “What the actual fuck?”

AI has seemed good for this because I can just post a piece into it and say “What kind of image concept will suit this?” and it will suggest symbolic things, explain to me why they’re symbolic (my brain does not do that either) and then generate options. I end up with a bridge or a path or an abstract geometric design and it looks OK to me.

But this is no good if so many people view these attempts with the visceral disgust some are describing (rather than confusion which is what tends to happen if I pick images myself). It’s certainly counterproductive if it makes people assume the writing will also be AI generated. (I don’t think that is indicated though. Many people who are good at formulating arguments are crap at visual imagery and many visual artists are crap are formulating arguments.)

Would it matter if my pieces had no image on them? I don’t tend to notice images on other people’s writing. If anything, they just get in the way of what I’m there for and I scroll past them with mild irritation like ads. But I was informed when running Areo that people generally like images and are drawn in by them.

I just don’t want to have to think about images.