Yeah, articles are including the image because they can. If a judge had instead ruled that AI generated works were copyrightable (and to the prompter, not the designer of the tool, owner of the hardware, or even the tool itself) the end result would be that very few orgs would include his piece instead just opting for generating their own (now copyrightable) image to use as an example. He'd still get nothing, but then significantly fewer people would see his "work."