Maybe you misunderstood. I advocate for using better arguments.
Opinion/Argument/Advice: Avoid AI. People do not like it. You will have less customers because they do not like it.
That is clear cause and effect and one can even bolster this by citing surveys where people tell their preferences about ai.
Compare to opinion/argument: Avoid AI. It is low effort. People do not like low effort. You will have less customers because of that.
That is presented as clear cause and effect, but it is flawed. It's simply not generally true. Creating ai images yourself is not as easy as it sounds. And it can be a lot more work than just browsing for free human made images. Also, you could have hand edit your ai images. There is no category for ai images that are heavily hand edited. They are still just denoted as ai graphics.
And it gets worse since you mentioned your own method of using free assets for a contrast. If you can shrug off ai usage as low effort, so can other people shrug off your browsing for the right image as low effort. How would they know that you did not just pick the first result. And if you think selecting the right images is creative input, well, crafting a prompt and selecting the right results is a similar level of input.
In your reply just now you mentioned the stolen art argument. It's a blanket exagerration and technically not correct. Also, you do not know if it is even true in the weak sense of unconsented training data for any particular ai system. An artist can train a network with self made art. The training data could have been 100% consented or public domain. Especially for audio you will even find things that were trained with specifically created training material. This stolen art argument is short sighted and generalizes too much.
So my point here is: you want strong arguments against ai usage. Not weak arguments that might crumble under scrutiny or depend on personal opinion.
That customers on average are not fans of ai is objective truth. No matter what anyone thinks about legality, lazyness or morality.
That ai usage is low effort depends highly on the developer. You do not know how lazy they were.
That art is stolen is subjective opinion. If it were objective, ai would be outlawed and we would not have such discussions.