Kinda understandable, but as a consumer, I already dislike that a lot.
In the beginning, AI 'art' was novel and interesting in a way. But now I've already seen so much generic illustrations, and in 95% they don't add any value to a blog post. I'm even less likely to click on links with a generated thumbnail these days. It creates an expectation of SEO spam or low quality and I have to wonder if the author also used AI to write the text. The generated images seem so soulless to me.
As a creator, I dislike it too. I'd love it if the platforms would just show you my content without the pictures. But the pictures are what make people click, so I'm stuck.
It's the same reason online recipes have life stories. Because Google rewards longer pages. So now you have to do that just to get seen, even if you don't want to.
I wonder if that's a conscious or sub-conscious decision on the clickers part? It's hard to imagine anyone is consciously motivated to click on an article because of an AI generated picture.
Personally, I like a shitty 1min hand-drawn stick figure a thousand times more than a generated image. But I'm probably a minority here. You're right, it's not what Google and SEO incentivizes.
In the beginning, AI 'art' was novel and interesting in a way. But now I've already seen so much generic illustrations, and in 95% they don't add any value to a blog post. I'm even less likely to click on links with a generated thumbnail these days. It creates an expectation of SEO spam or low quality and I have to wonder if the author also used AI to write the text. The generated images seem so soulless to me.