Without AI you'd still be looking at dozens of artists' mockups of wooden satellites because they have to put something at the top of the blog post or news article to catch viewer attention.
IIUC it's more that you do it to expand the page-inches on social media so that it's more likely readers will click through to your story, because social media displays the preview banner.
When it takes actual effort to create something, you tend to think about what exactly you are creating ahead of time. Time commitment and opportunity cost mean that the resulting work is a combination of both your raw mechanical effort and critical thought (both ahead of time and during the actual work).
Seriously - have people forgotten what so much of the Internet looked liked prior to just a few years ago? That is to say, exactly the same? SEO spam, quick artist mockups, mass-generated crap.
