No risk of investing money in studio time and equipment with the result being sub-par. You see what you pay for before you actually pay.

You already know what you get with stock images. When you do a shoot, it's not a sure bet that you're even going to get the images you wanted or needed.

I actually meant safest VS ai. But as other comments have pointed out it’s also a lot safer vs a shoot.

I’ve seen photo shoots costing hundreds of thousands of dollars not being used at all.

even multi million TV campaigns made and never run. Shooting is hard!