You may have noticed that my last few blog posts no longer have images. This is not exactly laziness, but rather intentionality. I don’t want to support flooding social media feeds with AI generated images, but I also think that now is a good time to look at why and how we share images in general.
Back From the Dead: A Brief History of My Blogging
Remember LiveJournal? Remember the spinoff for the alternative, DeadJournal. That was where I started blogging during my first year of university. All of my little freaks and weirdo friends had DeadJournals, and we used them to pour out our hearts. We alluded to crushes (that sometimes resulted in broken hearts and often resulted in hookups). We shared our ideas. Our emotions. And we read those of our friends. We cared how they presented themselves, not only in real-time, but in their mind. And do you know how many images my journal had? Very few. Those that did exist were actual pictures I had taken or the occasional poorly-edited snap from a movie that meant something to me. If there were pictures, they were relevant to my emotional state or the blog.
Paying the Piper: The Requirement of Images
Over time, the way we consume media on the internet changed. We no longer consume just our friends and the random 1-2 other people we’ve stumbled upon. Social feeds like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have made it so we are scrolling through thousands of strangers in addition to our friends and family. Secret algorithms now decide what to push to the top of our feed, and we can often find it difficult to even find the people we are most interested in. On the other side of things, it’s become difficult to get your information to the correct audience.
More and more often, I see friends and family posting Facebook updates with a random image of their children that has nothing to do with the post, and the explanation “Photo for the algorithm.” And unless I go to their profiles, these are the only posts I see from those friends — not because it’s all they are posting, but because they really are the only ones that show up in my feed.
Add onto the knowledge that social media and search algorithms sink posts without images, I’ve also taken my audience “professional.” I’m no longer sharing my DeadJournal with fifteen friends. I am trying to share my writing with the world and make a reasonable income from the books and stories I sell. So, when I started this website five years ago, I did the “responsible” thing and added images to all of my posts.
The Irrelevance of Images
When I added images to my posts, I did what most writers do: I got them from free sites like pixabay. Of course, I was building a “brand”, and so I had a whole series of modifications I would perform to make the images “mine.” Resizing, filters, color overlays. Boom. Scrolling through twitter you would see a dark blue gothic image and know I was posting a new blog. Great, right?
The only issue was these images had little to do with my actual message. They were there solely to pay the algorithm. They were not adding to my thoughts but “passing, this will do” images. In fact, finding and editing the images took away from my writing time.
That’s what I often see these days. Images that fit the post, but don’t add anything to it. They are not part of the discussion, but just flags to garner attention. More and more, I see the same stock images reused for different sites, and I begin to wonder what’s the point of all of this visual input? All it does is water down my reaction to actual meaningful art.
AI as a Catalyst to Change
These thoughts came to a head when people started posting all sorts of AI images. All of my feeds are flooded with them. My old work uses AI images instead of centering the art of the children they are helping. The scout organization I volunteer with has started using AI images to advertise events. And I get it — there is an expectation that all communication comes with at least an image (and now we are also moving into expecting videos). If we don’t have images, we risk being ignored. Becoming invisible.
The industry push back to AI seems to be: use more stock images! They are free and “ethical”. But I would propose that maybe the solution is not to flood social media with more meaningless images, but to reassess our relationship to imagery. If we truly want to respect visual art, we need to give appropriate space to feature the art. We need to be able to see it as something special and unique as opposed to just another image. The conversation around AI should not just be whether or not to use AI, but to examine our world that has created the “need” for it in the first place and to intentionally build the society that we want.
My Commitment
Things I’m not doing:
- Going through past posts and removing images. I don’t have the time or desire.
- Removing images from links I share. When possible, especially if it’s an AI image, I will try to share a link without an image preview. But most of the time I will just share links as they are.
- Completely getting rid of imagery. I will still post some images — these will likely be covers of my books (made by human artists) and marketing material for stories and books.
Things I’m doing:
- No longer posting images to serve the algorithm. If I include an image in my social media, it will be because the image is in conversation with my writing. I will have something to say about it, or I have something to feel about it.
- Taking time to read more posts that do not include images as opposed to doom scrolling to the next bright thing.
I realize not using images can hurt my author brand. Luckily, I’m a small author that relies mostly on word of mouth as opposed to visual advertisement. So I can afford to do that. I don’t begrudge those of you who continue to play the awful game we have been drawn into. But I do ask that, when possible, think about the culture of imagery we are creating and be intentional about what you share and what you consume.
