Commercial streets see record visits
Metro has a piece about a report from the Association des sociétés de développement commercial de Montréal about a record number of visitors to the city’s commercial streets this year.
I don’t mind the text being generated by AI, but check the image at the top of this piece.
EmilyG 10:37 on 2025-10-23 Permalink
Yikes, I didn’t know that they’d have AI images as well as AI text. That’s a terrible picture. It looks so sloppy with all the misspellings/made-up words.
Usually I read at least one of the articles linked before commenting here on the blog, but I’m not going to bother to read an article that humans didn’t bother to write (or illustrate.)
walkerp 11:50 on 2025-10-23 Permalink
In spite of all those pesky bike lanes taking up parking spots obviously…
MarcG 11:51 on 2025-10-23 Permalink
They appear to be using the WordPress/Automattic Jetpack AI assistant for the images, and probably the text as well. $6.95 a month to generate a “newspaper”, what a time to be “alive”.
As a bonus the image names seems to contain the prompt e.g. “a-highly-animated-commercial-strip-in-downtown-montreal.png”, “stylized-image-representing-outdoor-dining-on-montreals-saint-laurent-boulevard_ac390b.png”, etc.
Ian 22:22 on 2025-10-23 Permalink
That’s an amazing predatory business model. Whoever figured they could revive Metro with a frickin’ jetpack plugin is a classic Montreal scam artist
GC 22:52 on 2025-10-25 Permalink
Is that image the sort of thing we can complain to the OQLF about? Because that sure doesn’t look like French on most of those signs (or English.)