But it isn't. Unless you are a *real* master with these tools there is an unavoidable sheen that they leave on the generated image. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. This is not just me; if you go anywhere that younger people are congregating online, "boomer art" is the *most* polite thing that they call this stuff. It damages your credibility. If you were lazy enough to fake the image, are you lazy enough to fake the facts? It is *much* worse than just having no image at all.
This is hardly an original insight. Lots of other people are posting this exact advice. But I want to emphasize it because I just passed on linking to a page for like the 10th time this week because it included a big genAI hero image which looked like absolute shit. Scanning the article briefly it actually looked pretty good, it did not read like LLM slop, but it is a reputational risk to link to something that will give readers that immediate negative impression, and it's not worth it.