Buying a license for a stock photo vs using AI to create what you need is cutting corners? Don't thing there is much difference in effort (might even be more on the latter)?
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.
(I also think that labels will quickly become just "background noise" that is mostly ignored.)