The Crawl Tool Blog

Why are you asking this?

I recently came across this post by John Meuller on bluesky. For backfill on information this is how Google's describes his position:

John coordinates Google Search Relations efforts. He and his team connect the Google-internal world of Search engineering, to those who create and optimize public websites.

Though I often find myself feeling that there is a huge disconnect between what he public states on social media opinions to the actual work

How common is it in non-SEO circles that "technical" / "expert" articles use AI-generated images? I totally love seeing them [*] . [*] Because I know I can ignore the article that they ignored while writing. And, why not should block them on social too

Is This True? No

We can summarise the post as saying that when he says AI generated images, he knows that the article was low effort - the implication is that it was AI generated. This is, of course, one aspect of modern AI that we can't ignore. It is possible to use AI to generate an article and images entirely programmatically with zero input at all. There are also clearly people that do this.

The other side of the coin is that being a subject matter and technical expert doesn't make you an image/photo expert (unless that's the subject!). One could argue that for the majority of the articles on the internet subject matter and technical experts use an alternative lazy option - to license stock images. From large to small businesses and organizations, they're all doing it. They have put very little to practically zero effort into the image. Really small entities may not have the budget for this. The Crawl Tool, for example, tries to keep costs low for our customers. Paying to license images would increase prices. Luckily there are free sources of stock images that we use.

An alternative to free sources of stock images that has become available over recent years is AI images. Just like there are tools that programatically do the entire thing for you, there are tools that you can use to just help you add AI images (much like there are also tools to help add stock photos, there are even entirely automated ones that existed before generative AI).

In short, the overwhelming majority of image use on the internet has been extraordinarily low effort. AI usage is just a modern aspect of that. Most topical experts are not experts in making their own images! The idea that the image determines the accuracy and usefulness of the text is fallacious. I'm no fan of AI images, but that's as true for AI as it has always been for other forms of low effort images.

But Why I Still Wouldn't Use Them

There are two reasons I still wouldn't use them. Fallacious argument or not, it is unfortunately the case that AI images co-occur with AI text on larger proportion of cases than would be normal due to the fully programmatic tools. The second reason is connected - whilst the core argument he is making is fallacious, that doesn't mean that a lot of people don't share that same belief and fallacies. People's willingness to overlook fallacies often depends on their own belief systems and what they are pro/against. And boy have we learned that in recent years. There's no claim from anyone that Meuller is talking from a Google viewpoint here, but if we take his statement as a potential visitor to our website with a belief system that is anti-AI, then we have to accept that a proportion of visitors holds beliefs so strong that they would completely overlook and actively try to avoid your content if there was even a whiff of AI. 

Where Does That Bias Come From

If we follow the thread, Meuller continues:

I struggle with the "but our low-effort work actually looks good" comments. Realistically, cheap & fast will reign when it comes to mass content production, so none of this is going away anytime soon, probably never. "Low-effort, but good" is still low-effort.

It's that programmatic mass produced content we mentioned earlier. I think we can all relate, have seen stuff like that, and that indicates that the number of people who share his opinion would be very large.

But Isn't This The Pot Calling The Kettle Black?

Why yes it is. Google started as a search engine. It programatically scraped web pages and programatically enabled that to be searched and served up. Google is, and has long been, the king of programatically produced content and it's done so on an extraordinary mass scale that nobody had seen before. It is the king of low effort content.

Google expanded since then and has things like Youtube. That's a website that users contribute virtually all the meaningful content to. For Google, it's as low effort as you get. If a user, for example, doesn't chose a thumbnail image for their video then it's programmatically determined for them. Take their copyright systems - they are virtually entirely programmatic, leading to a vast majority of complaints.

In literally everything they have done, Google have aimed for low effort content and systems for themselves.

But this is not "AI" you say. Well a lot of it is, but it's not generative AI. But take a look at all of those systems and try to find one that doesn't now have a generative AI "summary" prominently attached to it. People are literally having to type swear words into search to turn them off.

Literally everything Google does is low effort content, and that is often forced upon users. If the logos were only AI generated, then Meuller would know they're not worth his time! I kid of course, but it is weird to be a representative of the world's biggest producer of low effort, programmatic content, publically discussing his disdain for low effort content! And granted, Google products are good (less good recently, but still good) - but as Meuller says "Low-effort, but good is still low-effort"

That said, I'm just pointing out the comparison - please don't take that as an excuse to produce even more trash.

I Can't write In Conclusion Here Because It Will Trigger AI Detectors

That an image is low effort says nothing about the text. Just the same as the fact that Google pays logo designers doesn't say their pages aren't low effort programmatic content. Indeed, it has long been the way of the internet and before that printed media, that because experts in something aren't necessarily experts in images then they take a low effort approach and outsource that - formerly to stock photo providers, and now more to generative AI. And if you want an image of a six fingered queen waving, why not? Just beware the Meuller is not alone in his opinion and it may have a negative effect on some traffic.