Because I love companies selling historical images that should be public domain and than adding their fucking watermark to all images of theirs that appear in search engines. Fuck Getty Images.

Plenty of open source image sites at this point

As opposed to the previous trend of getty greedily monopolising the industry, stealing images that they don't own copyright for and using their lawyers to mute smaller competitors they steal from? In this case AI is the lesser of two evils. If you don't hate getty, you simply don't know enough about them.

Maybe just the ones that won't sue you for your life's savings if you accidentally use one of their publicly available images on a random ass website receiving 50 visitors a month will survive. The ones people don't actively hate.

This exactly. Whats even worse, is that so many stock sites now try to pivot fully to AI. As someone who regularly uses stock images and videos at work this is so annoying. I don't want a fucking inbetween platform to AI generate some slop. Now more then ever there would be value in a site that gives me 100% real images. Like say if I want to illustrate a video about Peru i want videos that were actually shot there etc...

Slippery slope - straw man argument, nothing in the post you respond to says that.

Honestly... I rather have ai stock imgs then getty. The entire point of stock it's is they are place holder or filler imgs.

They are purely functional in nature. Ai is fine for that more or less.

Unsplash.