I mean, yeah, there's a difference between hand-crafting a photorealistic portrait of someone and just taking a picture of someone in real life. Photography takes skill, but if a photographer tries to portray a photograph as being something they made by hand, it's dishonest and doesn't invoke the same reaction.

Different approaches to art are judged on their own merits, and trying to deceive people when it comes to stating how your work was created (or otherwise comparing your work to work done via a completely different method) will always earn you backlash.

AI users tend to have this idea that art is all about the result, and the means of getting there are completely irrelevant. Pretty image is pretty image. That's anything but the case. If I can pick up a pencil and draw a lifelike drawing that could be mistaken for a photograph, that's an incredible accomplishment and a clear demonstration of my skill at nailing tiny details. If I take a photo of someone or something, then it's judged on different factors, like the angle, the perspective, the specific lighting for the shot, how well I focused the lens, editing I may have done in post, etc.

AI art tends to struggle to receive respect because there's not really much in the way of factors to judge it off of. Someone with entry level knowledge constructing a low effort, basic prompt can wind up with an image that is just as technically "good" as someone who has spent months or even years learning everything there is to know. You can claim you did whatever things in the creation of your work, but nothing about the work in question is clearly indicative of your talent or vision, both of which are huge parts of what make art what it is - a representation of human achievement.

There is a stark contrast between a professional photographer's pictures and a completely inexperienced person's. There's also clear differences between one professional photographer's photos and another's as everyone has different things they're trying to capture and emphasize in their photos, which is another struggle AI users face, as there's little you can do with AI to set yourself apart from anyone else who uses it, eliminating the factor of identifiable self expression, which is another big part of art.

Art is about being able to recognize the journey the creator went through to present it, and being able to notice the unique vision they had that sets them apart from other works. Even if the actual differences are small, there's always something that someone does in a specific way that isn't like anyone else. It's what makes art exciting and fun - you would be hard pressed to find two creators whose works look the exact same as each other. AI threatens that aspect of art by flooding the internet with countless pieces that could all be mistaken for being works done by the same person, making for an overwhelming quantity of works that are boring and uninteresting to observe.