[giantrobot]

You're going to fall of that high horse of yours and break something. Most art for blogs before AI was shitty stock photos, maybe with a filter applied. It was not high art. It wasn't a major creative endeavor. It was a means to get Google with it's toxic ranking to bubble a blog post higher than the low effort copy/paste slop.

Google ranks a text-only page lower than one with a hero image. It ranks pages with a single image lower than one with multiple images. The stock art industry had long ago devalued actual art on the web selling vast collections of stock photos for a few dollars or giving away dreck for free.

AI tools have put no more actual artists out of work than Shutterstock or Unsplash. At least with an AI tool someone can make a hero image slightly more creative than "vaguely ethnic woman looking at computer" or a n out of focus picture of a dandelion.

[forgetfreeman]

TIL hero images on blogs are a valid metric when discussing art as a concept. If that's your primary exposure you're uniquely unqualified to have an opinion.