alt Hacker NewsWhy on earth would you use an AI-generated image [1] (let me be clear: POOR AI IMAGE) for the banner of this project?
If you're going to use genai, you need to make sure it actually looks acceptable. Do at least one careful pass over it before publishing. Just look at the details:
- The text on the book spines doesn’t even spell “Microsoft” correctly.
- Dartmouth is spelled "Darmouth". SIGH.
- The screenshot on the CRT monitor doesn't remotely resemble any version of Visual Basic I’ve ever used and I’ve been using it since Visual Basic for DOS.
Using an image like this sets the tone and impression for the entire book going forward. Right now, that first impression isn’t good.
[1] - https://evilgeniuslabs.ca/uploads/content/2026/05/6fd5a7b327...
Replies
It won't be long before people realize that having poor AI images looks worse than having no images, in the same way that having a reaction GIF every other paragraph of a blog post fell out of style or deeply generic and unillustrative clip art or stock photos of puzzle pieces or featureless-white-3D-figure-with-hard-hat-holding-question-mark.
I sympathize with the motivations behind it, but it does look cruddy and cheapens the end result.
MICROSOFT MARL was definitely my all-time favorite product from Microsoft.
That computer (and chonky-boy floppy disk) look so unlike any real computer from back in the day that it honestly makes me question if the author knows anything about what that era was like.
My first impression was that the text style is dismayingly like either an AI wrote most of it or (to be charitable) the author’s writing has been heavily influenced by the current generation of LLM output. So the image style goes perfectly with it.
Thicc floppy disk.
The "Oomerd" button is probably the debugger by the sound of it?
I'm scared of the floppy disk used to load Visual Baction
These AI images are an absolute plague these days. I’m glad more people think they’re genuinely awful. To me they’re absolutely disgusting. I think I’d honestly prefer Macromedia Flash ads over this.
Get used to it. This is the future we've created for ourselves. It's only going to get worse as people everywhere try to use AI to distinguish themselves. Expect everyone to be an artist, everyone to be an author, everyone to be a programmer. Slop. It's what's for dinner.
Haha wow you weren’t kidding. That image is so bad that it looks like it was generated using 3 year old models.
The computer screen I can forgive, but if they author genuinely doesn’t have access to modern image generation tools then they could have at least loaded that image up in GIMP, Paint.NET or even just MS Paint, and added the text themselves.