Ned Ludd, if he even existed, has been claimed to be various things by various people: a folk hero, a disgruntled vandal, a progenitor of the modern labor movement, and some random moron. Even the machine-bashing methods employed by those claiming to act in his name — the Luddites — have remained an item of contention. From the early 19th century to the present day, people have argued about whether they accomplished anything useful, or whether they were counterproductive and reactionary.

Either way, they were inextricably tied to the material conditions of the time, and one cannot speak of Luddites without speaking of the industrial economy of their time: namely, one that gave rise to people who suddenly decided that becoming Luddites was a good idea. So, too, is there a debate about whether we ought to bash the machines in our own century. Some say yes, and some say no. Some say something more nuanced than that, but it's hard to hear above the crowd.

Indeed, on the English Wikipedia itself, some editors have taken a very dim view of the output of these last couple of years' increasingly prevalent text-to-image models (typically diffusion models), and sought to reduce their use on the project. Using "AI-generated" images on articles is often discouraged, unless the context specifically relates to neural networks. A hardline "Luddaite approach" has not been adopted by all Wikipedians, however, and model-generated images can be found across the project, sometimes in articles not directly related to machine learning.

The image guidelines generally restrict the use of images that are solely for decorative purposes, averring that they do not contribute meaningful information or aid the reader in understanding the topic (i.e. they are "WP:DECORATIVE"). Despite this restriction, it appears that paintings are permitted to be included in some medical articles, displaying human-made artistic interpretations of medical conditions and phenomena. They may not illustrate the subject matter in perfect fidelity, but they offer historical and cultural perspectives germane to the topics.