I don't think it signifies any of those things. This is all new stuff. Some people have decided to offload image-creation to machines because what they care about is the text.
This stuff you say it signifies, it says more about you than them.
This stuff you say it signifies, it says more about you than them.
A lot of traditional news outlets have a style rule that every article must have an image. Look at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.economist.com etc - every article has an image. Even a report on something highly abstract - "BP reports record profits" - will be illustrated with a photograph of some BP-branded fuel pumps. Stories on things like cybersecurity and inflation get generic images like snippets of blurry computer code, banknotes etc.
Some bloggers feel their blog is improved by adopting the style of professional journalism, and (among other things) put an image on every article. Even if for a programming blog good lead images are hard to come by.
Interestingly, professional journalism organisations often have pretty strict codes of practice about images, and photoshop use. They have rules on everything from illustrating one rocket launch with a photo of another to posing the subjects to colour-correcting images to creating multi-image collages. So I don't imagine we'll see many AI-generated images in traditional news outlets any time soon.
I seem to recall many instances of the use of incorrect photos, and the earliest I heard of was in the The Guardian in the 1980s before the general decline in media quality and standards.
It's awfully tempting for a war photojournalist to pose the group of tearful women in front of the bombed-out building across town. Or for the celeb gossip reporter to collage together two photos without making it clear it's a collage. Or for the person colour-correcting a photo of a divisive figure to lighten or darken their skin.
And the resulting rules are complex and at times judgement-based, because posing subjects is allowed in some circumstances, collages are sometimes allowed, some colour adjustment is allowed, and so on.
Still, serious journalists aren't going to be illustrating their articles about US-Iran negotiations with chatgpt any time soon.
No-one knows exactly how said images ended up getting this sort of usage. Presumably some random journalist was on Google Images one day, come across pics that looked vaguely like what they remembered the games to look like, and just kinda went with it.
I also remember quite a few cases where fan-made box art mockups got accidentally used as the pictures of the real thing, and when the BBC used a logo from Halo to represent a real-life organisation.
Same goes for book covers. You probably need something unless you want to look really generic and cheap. But I'm mostly not going to pay a designer hundreds+ of dollars for a cover of an independently published book. I have had a former colleague who is actually good with this sort of thing do it in the past. I've also done a crappy job myself, done it in conjunction with a publisher (for whom I had the supply the cover image), and, yes, used generative AI/Photoshop.
So now we have this low-effort image generation tool. At least it doesn’t indicate that the author wasted a substantial amount of time looking at pictures. Still a silly waste of time, but at least it is a small one.
It’s flooded the market to the point average users are starting to turn away. Look different or be relegated to obscurity.
People will always make snap judgments, you can't inspect every website in detail. So if you use AI, make sure there are some other signals of quality.