I don't blame you for it, as it's cheap, fast, and fits the context better than what can be provided usually. If you find that people are turned off by it, and want to act on it, I suggest stock images from places like Pixabay. They are royalty free so it's not much of a pain to use them, and there is a lot of good ones on the site as well. Downside is that they will probably be disjointed, like, every image will be its own style, which detracts from the unity of your website, but the upside is that you get rid of the negative associations with AI. Random idea, but you can use classical art as well, as they are all in public domain now. Then you could have the cohesion back: art, and humanity, which would fit the content well on a meta-level too.