I'm pretty much with you, but I admit I've used a few midjourney AI pics for my fiction. I avoid it for other Medium stories. I have more fun manipulating images, anyway. Sadly, one of my major sources for art, Adobe Stock, is now populating their collection with a LOT of AI images. I wish they'd stop.

The other thing about AI images are that they are almost always flawed in major ways. AI doesn't understand perspective very well, and it still often has trouble with hands (like I did when I tried to do illustration as a kid).

You're spot on about AI. It's a big web scraping machine. I think we need to push lawmakers to pass laws that compensate the owners of the work that the images scrape from.