I was also confused by that, it's a weird choice considering the articles themselves are full of original diagrams and illustrations that could easily have been used instead. The AI generated images are just visual noise.

Scratchapixel is the real deal but yeah, I know what you're saying. The "house styles" of services like Midjourney are so widely seen in scams and spam that they have become an automatic red flag. Doubly so when the material is supposed to be about non-AI means of creating images - why aren't you showing the actual product of following the course?

I'd say your bullshit detector needs some readjustment. You can make nice images with AI, especially as chapter images.

AI-thumbnails will be removed soon.

I would say generating chapter thumbnail images for a non artistic publication is probably the best use case for AI.

At face value yes, maybe. But low-quality content is increasingly associated with them, so the effective impact can easily get negative. I'd like to compare this to typical startup landing pages or doxygen documentations. Both can be spotted from a mile a way and are strongly correlated with padded and low quality content.

It isn't, because people associate these kinds of pictures with low-effort auto-generated clickbait and scams.

"people" as in "some people on HN"? Because I think as broader audience wouldn't necessarily mind or associate those images with scams.

Scratchpixel existed way before widespread generative AI. The content is great.