A year ago, most of our clients sent us stock photos for their websites. Now about half of them send us AI-generated images instead, usually made in a few minutes on their phone. Some of them look great. Some of them show a "team meeting" where one person has three hands.
The one that taught us the most was a bakery in Indore. The owner had generated a beautiful hero image of a croissant, golden and flaky, sitting on a marble counter. The problem? They don't sell croissants. The AI had decided that's what "fresh bakery" means. We swapped it for a slightly blurry phone photo of their actual nankhatai coming out of the oven, and enquiries for their gift boxes went up the following month. Probably not only because of the photo, but it certainly didn't hurt.
AI images are a useful tool. But they need the same judgement as any other content on your site. Here's how we think about them.
Where AI images work well
Abstract and illustrative visuals. Backgrounds, textures, conceptual illustrations for blog posts, patterns for section dividers. Nobody expects these to be "real", so they don't feel fake.
Mock-up scenes for products that don't exist yet. If you're launching a service and need a placeholder visual before a proper shoot, AI images can fill the gap.
Icons and simple graphics, as long as you clean them up. Most AI icons need a designer's touch to look consistent.
Where they don't
Your team, your office, your work. If a visitor sees a smiling "team photo" and later meets your actual team, the trust is gone. The same applies to "our factory", "our clinic" or "our completed projects". These should always be real photos.
Testimonials and case studies. A customer quote next to an AI face is misleading, full stop.
Food, rooms and products you sell. Restaurants, hotels and shops live or die on whether the photos match reality. An AI-perfect dish that looks nothing like what arrives at the table leads straight to bad reviews.
The legal side
We're not lawyers, and the law here is still moving in India and abroad. But a few practical points:
- Read the terms of the tool you used. Some free plans restrict commercial use, and terms change.
- Avoid prompts that copy a specific artist's style, a brand, a logo or a recognisable person.
- Don't assume you own exclusive rights. In several countries, purely AI-generated images may not be protected by copyright at all, which means a competitor could use the same image.
- Keep a note of which images on your site are AI-made and which tool created them. It helps if questions ever come up.
Spotting the obvious problems
Before anything goes live, we check every AI image at full size for:
- Hands, fingers and teeth.
- Text in the image, which is often garbled.
- Strange architecture: doors to nowhere, stairs that don't connect.
- Repeated faces in crowds.
- Lighting that doesn't match the rest of the page.
Also check the file size. AI tools often export huge PNGs. Convert them to WebP or AVIF and size them properly, or they'll slow your page down.
Our approach
Our rule is simple: use AI images where nobody would expect a photo to be real, and use real photos wherever a visitor will make a decision based on what they see. A phone camera and good natural light still beat a perfect-looking fake for the photos that matter.
If you don't have good real photos, a half-day professional shoot is one of the best investments you can make in your website. Even a morning with a friend who's good with a phone camera, near a window, will give you more honest material than a hundred generated images. It's cheaper than most people think, and it gives you images nobody else has.
