Recommendations for Wordpress featured image generation

How To
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I’m building a scenario to automate Wordpress blog posts and am trying to figure out how to generate the featured image. I’ve tried using a few different AI models (gpt-image-1, gemini-2.5-flash, and stable image core) to create images for posts, but none of them have been a good fit. The images created by gpt and gemini look okay, but the files are huge (around 1Mb). The images generated by stable image core are smaller but look goofy. I’ve also tried automating a pexels search, but that’s hit or miss as to whether the image it returns matches with the blog post. Does anyone have a method they’re using to generate featured images that works well?