Agreed - having played around with DALL-E 2 a fair bit and having made a lot of usage of stock images over the years (for blog posts with specific subjects), I

Agreed - having played around with DALL-E 2 a fair bit and having made a lot of usage of stock images over the years (for blog posts with specific subjects), I would say the former takes more work/time than the latter. With stock images I can just do a quick search on Shutterstock and find a lot of high quality options (usually), whereas with DALL-E 2 I need to figure out the exact prompt I want and iterate on it for a while. Stock images are not that expensive -- if you buy many it's as low as $2 per image, or on the high end (if you pay to just download a few per month) it's more like $10 per image. It does cost more, but time is money, so...