Legal Question in Intellectual Property in Georgia

I'm trying to make a digital educational lecture course on narrative design to sell online. I've written a script of my own words and thoughts that I'd like to record over a powerpoint presentation. In order to make the presentation more visually engaging, I have been using images from Google that I have cropped and resized throughout many of my slides. It just occurred to me, however, that this might be copyright infringement, especially since I'm aiming to sell this course online.

Technically, I have heard people argue that they are paying for my thoughts (which are my own) and my lecturing and not for the cropped images alone, but I'm not sure that this is an argument that would hold up in court. Additionally, I have heard that there can be copyright infringement even if used in non commercial settings.

Again, the images are cropped and resized to fit my needs and are not specifically relevant to the information. For example, when I start talking about protagonists in a narrative, I show an image of Batman with the word "Protagonist" behind it on the slide, to use as an example. When I mention the idea of "Designing your character" I show an illustration of cool looking character I found online through a quick Google search, again, just to compliment the words that I am saying. Is this still illegal?

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