The way you described it, “imagery of real people” is straight-up misleading: No likeness of any real person was generated. There’s no photos of him, how could his likeness possibly be generated if noone knows what he actually looks like.
Noone knows what Max Stirner looked like, either, yet we’re somehow using portraits of him. That’s the kind of thing we’re looking at here, and RetroBytes is being very transparent about it. Certainly more so than random publishing houses printing purported Stirner portraits on books.
Nah. The usual Stirner pictures (google exists, btw) are simply pictures of other people. No asking ChatGPT involved, just grab them.