Not really. I wish the trend of giant generic hero images on every blog post would go away, they almost never add any value. I think it was Medium that started the trend.
Unfortunately all social media sharing requires a thumbnail for easy clicking, no real way around it. (with Hacker News as the lone exception of course)
The default thumbnails in lieu of your own aren't good.
"Making clicks more likely" is a terrible measure of genuine value.
There are lots of images which will make people click, even if once they see your page they click 'Back' a second later. Our metrics are broken if we continue to attribute that click as 'success'.
> "Making clicks more likely" is a terrible measure of genuine value.
Genuine value, to who? For the author, getting more clicks is probably of "genuine value", depending on their goals for their writing. But seems most people are not writing and publishing stuff today because they think it provides value to others, but because they think it'll provide value to themselves somehow.
The question is: do you actually want to attract people who only click because of an image? And if you AI-generate it, are you fine with parts of the target audience not clicking on obvious AI thumbnails because they assume the entire content is low-effort?
One is aesthetic filler that is true to its purpose of loosening up the typography of a wall of text. The other tends to be awkwardly clever on a level of awkward that was unknown to mankind until recently. I used to hate stock photography fillers just like everybody else, but now my preference is as clear as it would be surprising to past me.