most of them anyway—and certainly everything on Medium
The overwhelming majority of images accompanying text on the internet are useless. This has been true for at least a decade, and it may get worse with the propagation of generative AI, but this thought is not about AI.
Now, I’m not saying all images on the web are useless—far from it. Just that if we’re ever trying to combine the worth of an image to an article it accompanies, the answer is basically always zero. There is simply no extra information conveyed with these pictures. It is usually just something tentatively related to the piece, where removing it would not change your understanding of the article at all—like a stock image of some coffee for an article on waking up early.
I am reminded of a time when a friend took a photo of his locker number so he wouldn’t forget it. It was something like 120. We checked the file size of the photo and it was over 1 MB—literally 1 million times the amount of storage required for the 1 byte number. That is the wonder of abundance, and the convenience made sense there, but most of these articles would be lucky to even be conveying a single byte of information, never mind 1000 words. The blended exchange rate of images to words has tanked.
This inert image issue was not the case for newspapers—they had limited space and so could only choose a few top photos, often actually conveying something important, but now for some reason everything needs an image. Every Medium article thinks it is the headline story. There is the option to put in an image, so I must put one in.
Why is this happening? Presumably our seemingly insatiable desire for visual information. But abundance in one area can easily encroach on the finitude of another, in this case—attention.
What is to be done? Well firstly, if you hadn’t noticed this before, I’m sorry for possibly ruining the internet. All I can think to do is to be more vigilant ourselves in our use of images, and celebrate wonderful text-only posts, like Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace”. This frustration was also part of the logic behind building lynkmi, so if you’d like to hang out in calmer, more text-centric place, please join us.
This all rhymes a bit with the increasing visual clutter of our built environment, with some places like São Paulo and Grenoble being the rare ones to push back and ban public advertisement. It also feels somewhat similar to our seemingly insatiable desire for more light, with the global percent of GDP spent on lighting being roughly constant over a long period of time, even with the cost per lumen decreasing a lot. In general, with more options comes the need for more restraint.