The article author should have specified more closely which type of image. Stock image sites had already made generic photos and drawings cheap to include. And indeed they look cheap. The more airbrushed and high quality the cheaper it looks. If a dentist website has cheap beautiful stock nurse photos, it's less valued than real photos taken by a photographer at their location.
At that point why have images at all?
Just go full American Psycho eggshell business card.
It's hard to articulate this stuff, and especially hard to explain it to the AI infatuated among us because they don't really want to understand why people dislike the tooling they're obsessed with. AI is good at many things, digesting vast quantities of information, and code being most of them. Everything else to me looks/sounds like shit. AI music sounds dull and overproduced in a way that a lot of middling pop music does. AI images look overtuned and strange in the same way a magazine editor would, if they had no self control with their tools. It just... looks bad. As an aesthetic. If you are not aesthetically minded, you may not care, or you may not be able to tell, and that's fine. But I am and I can and if I open your blog post and see AI crap, I'm leaving. I'm not asking anyone else to, and I don't give a shit if my best friend in the world wants to beat his meat to your AI generated sunset, good for him, I hope he has a great time. But I'm not interested.
Why these super-pro-AI people take this as such a personal slight is strange to me. You didn't care enough to actually make something, what are you offended if I tell you I don't really want to look at it?
Once in a while you get a good one, one that stands out among all the others, and that's a worse outcome because the same image will be used by everybody including your competitors.