Because social sharing seems to work better with an image and hand crafting something for every post is exhausting.

> hand crafting something for every post is exhausting.

Spending hours doing trial-and-error with image-generation prompts is also exhausting.

Are we at the point where authors can feed their entire article text into an image-generator and it repeatedly (95%?) produces appropriate, if not very apt, artwork?

Most likely some SaaS that is ultimately mechanical turking the work out to some country with cheap labor.

I will say, when I have used them I haven't spent more than a few minutes on the prompts. But I'm typically more focused on the writing and the image just needs to be "good enough" unless it's something specifically relevant to the content.

Everyone says they that and has been before AI. What they always miss is the little word "relevant". A relevant picture can be helpful, a random picture is just distracting and annoying.

I don't find it that random in a post about Postgres to show a picture of an elephant. If it had been a badger or something, then yes, but an Elephant is pretty relevant as animals go.

The image is there for social media shares, which grab a prominent image to put beside the link. Even if it's a bit distracting in the post, if it grabs your eye enough to click the link, then that's job done.

Links without an image are just physically smaller on Twitter or Facebook, they don't stand out as well.