Buying a license for a stock photo is paying someone who has put the effort.

Well, okay, I am not sure how much effort goes into creating your typical stock photo, probably not a lot, just still more than 0 effort it takes for the AI to generate it.

And yes, I see difference between an automated system flooding the web with AI generated "news" in disguise vs a niche blogger using AI to iterate on an image with hand crafted prompts. Labels are not perfect, just better than nothing.

Compliance burden tend to favor the large, which is not what I think is a direction that needs more pushing into.

(I also think that labels will quickly become just "background noise" that is mostly ignored.)