An AI Image Is Not a Real Photo Right?

I’ve had great fun with AI art, and even AI photo-realistic image making. A great friend of mine trained a stable diffusion model with images of me, and I was able to generate a fair few simulated images of myself from it using varying prompts. But without the source images of my, the model would not have been able to gnerate my likeness in any kind of way, despite the prompts. I don’t have a problem with the tech or it’s usage.

No artist is afraid of new mediums, however I do have a problem when a $20,000 grant for photography is given over to allowing AI Generated images giving them the equivalent status, it’s simply wrong. That would be like allow painters, or sculpters to participate. Photography is about making images through exposure to light on a photo-sensitive medium, whether digital or film and if you’re grant or contest is about photography, then make it about photography is all I’m saying.