Reject AI Bullshit, Embrace Human Jank
Embracing Humanity Instead of the Uncaring Machine
I hate artificial generative intelligence.
I hate it a lot.
I hate it so much, not only have I written about the subject, but I hold a pretty firm, no AI policy on Substack.
If you use AI in your thumbnails, I don’t read your content, I don’t follow, and I certainly don’t subscribe. If I see someone I do follow or subscribe to use it, I’m out.
If you use AGI for thumbnails, that’s already reprehensible enough, but god knows what else you use it for.
In my hate, I’m here to evangelize the human element, to talk about why using your own mind and hands is the best option.
My thumbnails are janky. They are fucked up. The thumbnail for my most successful article (to date) is photoshopped with a picture of Hillary Clinton that couldn’t get more pixelated. My logo is shoved in the corner, and it’s way too fucking big. It’s a “graphic design is my passion” joke of a thumbnail.
I cooked that image up, absolutely hammered trying to get the article published, and thought, “That’d be funny. Let's do that,” and I did it.
Do I put more effort into thumbnails? Absolutely.
But an actual human put those together. I found the images and put them together without some AGI cooked up by a misanthropic tech bro stealing from a hardworking artist.
I could have a shiny, off-putting picture of Hillary Clinton standing bewildered in a field. But I opted for something I made, just like I published something I wrote.
I put them together the way I wanted them to come out. I didn’t hope that an apathetic machine would do it for me at the expense of another living, breathing human being who worked to put their vision to paper.
If you are a writer who uses only your brain, you write everything; you do your own proofreading. You read it out loud for clarity. Hell, you might get someone to beta-read it before you hit publish.
Why the fuck would you suddenly turn around and ask a machine to shit out a thumbnail?
Photoshop is not free. I don’t use it, and I totally understand someone not wanting to drop hundreds of dollars for it.
But people will happily pay for Midjourney, I guess.
I use GIMP; it's not a perfect alternative, but it's free and kind of like Photoshop. If you don’t like it, here are some alternatives to look through. They’re free, and I promise, there are tutorials online.
Do you make money from Substack and have some cash to burn? Here’s a Fiverr page for thumbnail artists. Some are $5, and some are $20.
A YouTuber I enjoy, Mandalore has an incredibly simple and easy approach to Thumbnails.
The image as is on the Steam storefront.
His thumbnail.
You don’t have to do some elaborate Photoshop. You don’t have to include drop shadows, text, a gradient, layers, or transparency tricks. Grab an image, slap your logo on it, and make it look nice. Fuck, I do that too.
I’ll shamefully admit that I’ve done less than that. I’ve just grabbed an image, given credit, and used it as a thumbnail. I’ve since changed my policy and will edit those thumbnails later. But I will argue that is better than using AI.
I see a lot of people on Substack use AI for thumbnails. It’s one of the few things that crosses political and topical boundaries.
I care about the product of the human mind. I care about what people thought about and cared enough about to send out to the globe to be read by other people. When I see someone turn to AI for a thumbnail or submit their writing to Claude, (Oh my god, that makes me want to shit a brick. Why the fuck would you do that? I stop caring. I stop caring because a human wasn’t involved. An uncaring machine neutered by the sensibilities of some dumb fuck tech bro from California.
Until next week.
Excellent