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It’s anti-information really. It distracts the brain and prevents us from better imagining the real facility, or let’s the author imagine they’ve done work instead of actually finding a suitable photo of the facility.

Reminds me of the images on this article from last year, which when they were first posted didn’t even have the clarifying captions they have now: https://newatlas.com/lifestyle/powdered-beer/

AI is just the next step of the worthless newspaper illustration, before that they used stock images. They know people are more likely to stay on an article which has images so they invent some even if it doesn't make sense.

Not useful, but artistic in nature. A number of magazines used to have illustrators do something similar in cases where there was no appropriate imagery.