Can You Use AI Images For Blogs? Stock Photos vs AI for SEO
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) for writing blog content has become more and more popular in the past year. It helps you quickly collect information, create a structure, and add content to your post. However, AI isn’t just good for preparing text– it’s great for creating images as well.
In this post, we’ll compare stock photos and AI-generated images to determine which is the better solution for your blog.
What Are AI Images?
AI images are pictures that are created by providing a prompt to a program like Midjourney, DALL-E 3, or Craiyon. They reference millions of images online and check the image’s data against your prompt so that it knows what to take inspiration from.
For example, you could ask it to create “a majestic golden retriever sitting on a cloud in golden light” or a “computer screen showing a website.”
As you can see, it creates custom images in a wide variety of styles and tailors the results to your specific needs based on what you tell the program to do. So, you can tackle various blog topics with an AI image generator.
How AI Images Compare to Stock Photos
Just like AI tools, there are many stock photo resources available for you to use for your blog. Whether you’re starting a new blog or looking for ways to boost your blog’s engagement, choosing between AI images vs stock photos is a decision you’ll have to make.
Here’s how they compare in five crucial categories.
Selection
If your blog includes a variety of industries or you create a lot of content, the image selection you have available is important for simplifying content sourcing.
Stock photo sites have a limit to how many options they offer for your search, so repeated content in your industry may make you run out of images to use.
AI offers the ability to create near-infinite numbers of unique images – as long as you can create a prompt that achieves it.
Learning Curve
Stock photos are easy. Just search, download, and insert.
However, AI images require knowledge and experience with the program you use so that you can accomplish the image you’re aiming for. It’s not too advanced, but using AI often requires refining.
Cost-Efficiency
Stock photos come in free and paid subscriptions. You might pay per image or pre-pay for a number of images per month, but you won’t often get unlimited images.
AI image generators also come in free or paid options. However, many subscriptions allow for unlimited generations (sometimes at lower speeds), allowing you to get more use out of it for higher volumes of blogs.
Licensing
When you buy stock photos, you’re essentially buying the license to use that image for personal use. However, you might have to pay more for commercial use, making them less flexible for organizations.
AI generators are original images without an artist to pay, so you’ll usually have full commercial rights as a service subscriber.
User Experience and SEO
One of the primary negatives of stock photos is that anyone can use them. You can find the same images for your article in your competition’s, making it hard for you to create a unique experience for readers.
With AI images, you’re almost guaranteed to have a unique image for your blog, helping to improve the user experience. Unique images are also more likely to rank in image search results to help boost your search engine ranking.
The Verdict: AI Images or Stock Photos
Choosing between AI images and stock photos will have an impact on your blog’s look, your workflow, and your budget.
AI images can provide more value, a wider selection, a better user experience, and improved SEO benefits. Stock photos make it easy to get started and take little to no time to source images, but your options are limited.
Looking to establish or upgrade your blog for SEO? Watt Media can help you create a unique user experience and articles with great images that search engines love to boost.
Get started today!