People buy pictures to hang on their wall. Most of the time the subject is something completely unknown to them. For all they know it could have been produced by AI. Does it matter?

Of course people also hang pictures of things they know about. The only thing AI will contribute to this is to make people smile or look at the viewer.

I shot a 90th birthday with about 50 people a week or two ago. I used AI on some of the group shots. When you get 12 people in a group and use flash (the party was late in the day in a downstairs room with poor lighting) it's sometimes a challenge to deal with blinkers, distracted subjects, and people who aren't looking happy. Although my usual approach is to take several bursts of 3-4 shots (to address blinking), and swap heads to get smiling people, AI made the process faster by moving mouths into a smile and redirecting eyes to look at the camera.

IMHO, although the resulting pictures don't strictly present reality, they show something close enough to be useful in a family photo. The subjects are capable of smiling and/or looking at the camera. AI just makes it happen.

The definition of photography is surely shifting considerably, and I see little difference between an artificially created CGI image and some Photoshop work.

Changing the sky is, to my mind and IMHO, not "real" photography as I originally understood.

Do I change out skies etc? Sure, but I can't say to anyone, here's my vacation shot of ______ , what a wonderful sunset.

It's just a question of degree, and we started down the slope a long time ago. But we aren't happy when the slope steepens beyond our perceived comfort level.

Even the venerable Ansel Adams generated his images through what can be arguably called artificial means - darkroom manipulations, dodging, burning etc., until the image said what he wanted it to say, not necessarily what the scene actually looked like.

Protective flame suit now on!