Didn't yet go through the content, but having a AI generated image that you didn't even bother to at least touch-up a bit to fix the text does not give me a lot of confidence about the effort that went into this.
I came to this comment section to say exactly that.
At my work (university research lab) the Ph.D. students have to publish their thesis as a book to defend their degree. They are free to make the image for the cover, which is a very nice touch ang give you artistic freedom in what was supposed to be one of the most important moments of your career (I went for a picture of the chip I designed during my research).
For the past 3 years or so all we have are generic AI generated sciency-looking figures at the cover and it is depressing.
Adds nothing, they could just picked a totally unrelated stock photo if they wanted to add something there. It just immediately halo effects the whole thing as something put together without effort. Stop doing this!
Isn't this overly critical ?. The content matters far more than the image and the chapters are good. I didn't even register the image - I think most folks today have eyes that auto-skip images after being pattern-trained to ignore ads.
The cover has a stack that says "ngirx", and it's all a smudgy mess.
"Don't judge a book by its cover" is for people who don't actually read books. You can't necessarily tell when a book is good based on its cover, but you can absolutely tell with a high certainty that a book with a lazy, crappy, low effort cover is probably going to have a similar level of care and attention put to the contents. It's easily at least a 95% hit rate. Is not overly critical to see something presented lazily and assume it will also be lazy inside, and in this kind of field, I'd also expect that if the cover is AI generated, most of the content could easily be as well.
"Don't judge a book by its cover" indeed (and litteraly in that case), but also "first impression matters".
In that case throwing a generated image without touch up shows the lack of care of the author for a work that's not as fleeting as a podcast. It's not that hard to type the correct words and/or a non wobbly font with Paint.NET / Photopea / Gimp / Affinity Photo / Photoshop / <your favorite pixel editor here>. It also shows an usage of AI without supervision which is kind of a red flag.
I used to listen to Michael Kennedy a lot when my day job was Python, and still occasionally do so this may get a pass, but it's still a bad signal in my books.
I’m an occasional listener of the Talk Python podcast, and I’ve also taken Michael’s pytest course. It’s clear that he puts considerable effort into his content.
But there was no care in the images, which made me skeptical of the content. The free chapters are also poorly written. It reads like he dictated the content and didn't do a single review pass on it. The Docker Compose chapter especially is very light on details and doesn't explain how to use the various features and what tradeoffs or issues you may encounter. Like the AI images, the whole product feels rushed and haphazard and lacking in quality.
In which case it is very infuriating and sad. Honestly if he just did not put that AI art on every page, the whole thing would look way more serious. Presentation and first impression sadly do matter.
Put a pile of trash in a museum and people will think it's art, put art next to a pile of garbage and people will think it's trash.
These days I feel like a stick figure drawing in MS Paint even if crude denotes that an actual effort was made compared to "Generate an image of XYZ that includes blah blah blah..." sadly.
In my mind both are first steps to something more "proper" but one is at least hand-crafted artisan-ish compared to the other.
I have no qualms about using AI generated images as placeholder stuff or as a first step in an iterative process but when someone just slaps the image without the least bit of retouching it ends up looking kitsch.
I think you're going to realize that as time passes and this becomes more normalized, your opinion is going to become the minority. That might be a good thing, or maybe not.
What about the content of the "conversations that bookend each chapter"? Are these real people giving their opinion that the second chapter is "fascinating" and that things "make sense" or is it AI-generated? If the latter, what's the point of presenting fake opinions?
Those "reader's briefs" are definitely AI. But they are discussed here a tad out of context. If you actually had the book and pull them down, the first track is me telling about them. It clearly says these are AI and just for fun, enjoy or skip. Here's the intro if you're interested:
Hey Sean. I spent 9 months writing this book by hand. Yes the image is AI but the book is certainly not. You're definitely not obligated to read it, but I do want to comment that I put a ton of effort into the project.
Hi Mike! If you spent 9 months writing this book by hand, couldn't you do the courtesy of commissioning an artist to make you a cover image by hand as you clearly see the value of doing things by hand and not stealing the hard work of all the artists who have worked tirelessly to make art by hand only for AI to steal that work and for you to prompt it in seconds.
Put more effort into respecting other art forms and you might not get this reception next time.
Just not enough to actually record a podcast, but generate a script and send it to an API to generate a (very recognisable) AI voiced podcast. It's literally called "Talk Python" with no humans talking.
Not sure if you're confusing with something else? "Talk Python to Me" is a long running podcast that has had a lot of definitely real humans on the show[0].
I am as confident as possible that it's not- a lot of the guests are fairly known figures in the open source world (Wes McKinney, Charlie Marsh, Ned Batchelder) and video footage of the podcasts are available.
The podcast has also been going for several years, before it would have been possible to generate audio podcasts with AI.
Joel, my podcast has been going for 10 years, I've done research and an interview nearly ever week over that time period resulting in over 500 episodes. It's not AI.
What you are referring to is the Readers' brief and you're taking it out of context. If you actually went to all of them, you would find this as the very first "track":
It clearly explains that this is an extra to the book, it's created with AI and meant to be fun. It makes minor mistakes but enjoy it if you like or just don't listen and read the book without.
Here is the transcript from that opening track in case you don't want to listen:
Hello and welcome to the Reader's Brief for the Talk Python in Production book. This is your author, Michael Kennedy. I am thrilled you're interested in the book.
This companion audio series features short, exploratory conversations around each chapter of the book. They typically range from two and a half to four minutes per chapter. You can listen to each chapter's Reader's Brief just before reading a chapter to help you get in the ideal mindset. Or you can listen afterward and let your mind wander and expand on the ideas covered in the chapter. It's all up to you. Once I neared completion of the book, I had been brainstorming how I could offer an audio version. However, there are sufficiently many code listings that are too important to the content to really support a word-for-word audio book. It would be rough to listen to me narrate a Nginx configuration file to you, for example.
Thus, I came up with the reader's brief idea. A conversation around topics of each chapter in a brief two to four minute format that adds to the book rather than a traditional spoken true audio book. I do want to set expectations a bit. The reader's briefs are spoken by AI. Very good ones, by the way. So you will hear an occasional misspoken acronym such as Nginx or SSH. But enjoy these for what they are and don't expect perfection. They're really interesting ideas and background stories and thoughts on each chapter.
I hope you find that they add value to your experience. I know they did to mine. Finally, I have added the necessary metadata to the MP3 files. You should be able to add them all to your music library and they will appear in a single album. MP3 file for all the chapters together and put chapter markers in that MP3 file. Pick which one you want. Thanks for the interest in my book. I'll be with you page by page as you learn from it. Cheers.
Thanks for the reply, unfortunately I've not heard of the podcast before, the only thing I see is the AI art and AI chat embedded on the page too. Just looked and sounded off. Appreciate that's not your intention, but it's how it looks to a person who's never heard of the podcast before.
Listened to it and yeah... not only is the voice obvious AI, it drops an "It's not just X — it's Y" within the first 20 seconds. Copy-pasted straight from GPT.
Likely safe to assume that everything on this site is AI generated, including the book.
If anyone else was confused, they're referring to the Audio Readers' Briefs. I didn't immediately recognize it as AI. To be honest the voice sounds exactly like my coworker responsible for doing our product video demonstrations.
I skipped through it and heard it pronounce nginx as en-gee-onix and only then did I realize it was fake.
You might want to mention this on the website as well, where it's definitely not clear. I also don't see how to navigate from the website to the introduction where it's explained.
That's a good point. I just redid the sample audio to include the opening section that adds that opening track that sets the stage with the positioning I put above.
I agree with everyone! Michael's name is a big stamp of "this will be high quality" for me, but if I didn't previously know that and saw an AI generated cover, there's a good chance I'd assume the content inside was AI generated slop, and might tune out without looking any further.
Thanks sort of Ben. :) The book is 100% human written over 9 months by me. The image is AI yes, but the book is not AI slop. It may be slop, but it's my slop if that's your assessment.
Love the podcast! I'm sure it isn't slop of any kind - I've really enjoyed reading your recent blog posts about Talk Python's web set up, so I'll definitely be giving it a read.
I don't even understand why they do that, surely putting even a low quality something together would make it much better, and with actual font rendering.
Yeah, immediately off-putting, even though I actually enjoy the podcast. Not for like "AI bad" reasons, it's just ugly. Micheal, if you are reading this - please fix, it should take 5 minutes.
I clicked on the link and was greeted by AI slop instantly. I checked the comments, saw this, am writing this and will probably not look at it ever again. Guess I am just not the target audience. I wish them that their AI slop strategy works out just for the sake of good vibes, though. If everyone does it it can't be bad, right? I'm the issue here, clearly.
ngirx and granian are my favorite technologies to work with! Completely agree, this trend of putting a completely useless and ugly AI image on top of your page, I despise. You could have searched the web for an actual diagram, if you wanted one here. These images provided negative values to your articles.
