Hadn’t thought about that, you make a good point. However in that case the author didn’t feel it necessary to explicitly say the image is not AI generated, which means they likely share very different views about AI artwork and I’ll probably avoid.

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.