Are there vague images padding the article for SEO purposes?
If so, is there attribution to an artist? If they contain images and don’t attribute, I avoid the website. Either they use AI to make SEO bait, or they steal artwork. I’ll avoid in either case.
AI text is much harder to detect, not sure of a good way to avoid it at the moment.
Even without that caveat, if they feel it beneficial to pay for stock photos for an article I’m probably good giving it a pass. Most major stock media companies are buying fully into AI generation anyways, and I can’t think of too many cases where stock images really add anything to an article aside from adding to the page size by an order of magnitude.
I'm not sure why you think every use of AI generated images is "SEO bait". I'm sure some (most?) are, but it's perfectly plausible a well written article uses AI art in place of a generic image off unsplash or whatever.
Most of the internet is SEO bait. It’s the safe default assumption.
And if the images have AI-generated attributions?