Comment by gennarro
7 days ago
Very spammy images. Is this a legit resource? The test is interesting though 6 hrs/day in sunlight is very extreme for artwork.
Also I’m wondering is a fixer would help or hurt the testing. This is common with some art, like pastels.
There's:
1 header image
1 image showing in process
1 image explaining lightfastness
3 images explaining the importance of lightfastness
1 image explaining the measurement process
1 image linking to another article diving much deeper into the methodology
1 image linking to another article on a different color pencil concern (layering)
1 image representing each brand-line's lightfastness
Every single one of those images seemed relevant to the concept presented and clarified something that would have been difficult to articulate succinctly in writing. For example, the "how was this measured" is a lot easier to understand once you've seen the grid of squares before and after than it would be to try and articulate the fading of colors in small squares in text.
There's LOTS of individual images on specific brands, but given their wild degree of variance, I think it's really useful to perceptually see what's going on with each one.
I'm curious, where do you feel the images were "spammy"? It's a conclusion I heartily disagree with, but would love to understand.
I think gennarro is reacting to the very SEO-friendly organization of the article. Every content farm produces articles with this kind of flow, often with Wikipedia-style tables of contents at the beginning. But they do it because it’s very similar to the structure an actually informative article would take! So we can’t tell for sure whether the author adopted an SEO-friendly structure for her informative and original content, or if her content just happens to be a good model of the style that content farms have chosen to imitate.
Accelerated testing (6hrs/day) is standard practice in materials science - it compresses years of normal exposure into months while maintaining relative degradation patterns. Fixatives might alter results by adding UV inhibitors, but most artists want to know worst-case baseline performance.
She didn't even promoted a single pencil brand on the conclusion. She just shows the data and let the viewers decide.
What did you find spammy about the images? The ads for the artist's coloring books and calendars and such?
Although someone will challenge me on that, I'm 100% sure that large chunks of the text are AI-generated. That said, the website itself has been around at least since 2017 (the text just wasn't as verbose - e.g., https://sarahrenaeclark.com/diy-gift-bag/).
So, I suspect it's legit. It's a case of an author leaning on a crutch for writing, but we're here to judge the results, not the phasing.
Why do you think it's AI? It reads to me like someone who has a special interest and a data driven mindset.
I've seen plenty of people "rate every X" in youtube videos or blogs before, this one is just more data oriented than most.
First, it just reads that way. It's the default style if you ask ChatGPT to write a couple of paragraphs that explain why lightfastness is important.
Second, while I know there are reasons to be skeptical about AI text checkers, the author's earlier (less verbose) style doesn't get flagged at all, while the style in more recent articles gets classified as heavily AI-assisted.
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