ai Archives - Neil Turner's Blog

You may have noticed that several of my recent blog posts have featured custom AI art work related to the topic. I’ve generated these using Microsoft’s Bing AI Image Creator, which uses OpenAI’s DALL-E text-to-image model. DALL-E can generate an image based on a text prompt; for example, the featured image on this post was ‘A 1950s style robot standing in front of an easel painting a bouquet of flowers in a vase’.

These are some of the other AI art images that I’ve used recently:

An AI generated image of a superhero emerging from a server cabinet, generated using Microsoft's Bing AI Image Creator

An illustration of a phoenix rising from the ashes, with a web page. Generated by the Bing AI Image Creator

AI art is controversial. It can create images in a few seconds that would take a human artist hours or days to produce. And, in some cases, these image prompts can be told to create images in the style of a particular artist, depriving them of income from a commission. It’s also notable that models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have been trained on copyright works, without the rights holders’ permission.

With this in mind, I’m justifying my use of AI art on some of my blog posts because I’m not an artist myself, and as an individual blogger who doesn’t make money from blogging, I wouldn’t have the money to pay a human artist. Whilst I have over 5000 photos that I’ve uploaded to Flickr, there isn’t always a relevant photo to use that I have taken. For example, in my recent post on comment spam, I decided to generate the above image of a robot converting blog posts into a tinned meat product, because I don’t have a photo that represents that. And whilst I make use of screenshots where relevant, sometimes this isn’t appropriate.

Of the AI art generators that I have used, the Bing AI Image Creator seems to be the one that gives me the best results. Any images you create are saved in the cloud, and can be downloaded for re-use. And each prompt produces four images so that you can choose the one which looks the best.

So now that I’m blogging again, it’s the return of comment spam on my blog posts.

Comment spam has always been a problem with blogs – ever since blogs first allowed comments, spam has followed. Despite the advert of the rel=”nofollow” link attribute, automated bots still crawl web sites and submit comments with links in the hope that this will boost the rankings in search engines.

In the early days of blogging, blogs often appeared high in Google’s search engine results – by their very nature, they featured lots of links, were updated frequently, and the blogging tools of the time often produced simple HTML which was easily parsed by crawlers. So it was only natural that those wanting to manipulate search engine rankings would try to take advantage of this.

I’ve always used Akismet for spam protection, even before I switched to WordPress, and it does a pretty good job. Even then, I currently have all comments set to be manually approved by me, and last week a few got through Akismet that I had to manually junk.

Humans, or AI?

These five interested me because they were more than just the usual generic platitudes about this being a ‘great post’ and ‘taught me so much about this topic’. They were all questions about the topic of the blog post in question, with unique names. However, as they all came through together, and had the same link in them, it was clear that they were spam – advertising a university in Indonesia, as it happens.

Had it not been for the prominent spam link and the fact they all came in together, I may have not picked up on them being spam. Either they were actually written by a human, or someone is harnessing an AI to write comment spam posts now. If it’s the latter, then I wonder how much that’s costing. As many will know already, AI requires a huge amount of processing power and whilst some services are offering free and low cost tools, I can’t see this lasting much longer as the costs add up. But it could also just be someone being paid using services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, even though such tasks are almost certainly against their terms of service.

I think I’m a little frustrated that comment spam is still a problem even after a few years’ break from blogging. But then email spam is a problem that we still haven’t got a fix for, despite tools like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I’m guessing people still do it because, in some small way, it does work?