One was created and hand drawn onto some medium by a talented human, the other was never seen by a human eye until it was belched completed out of a computer program.

One was created line by line with purpose and intent, using materials, textures, colors, tones and an understanding of composition. The other was cobbled together by scraping the Internet for work by artists and then analyzing millions of images to mimic them.

Machine learning cannot create anything new, only approximate an execution of what has already been done.

Having an idea for an image and not being able to execute it but only tell someone or something else to do it, is the other side of that coin. If you can type a great description, you may want to call yourself an author, and then hire an illustrator.

Here's a photo of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

I find that most folks take the same arch picture, something that could be called a travel photo. I like to look for different angles or perspectives when I can. On this occasion I had great fun taking a whole series of shots from different angles.

There is no cropping, but there was some fun with the sky and pulling out the detail in the arch's surface.

I totally enjoy black & white photography, and have a monochrome website at www.photomono.us. I invite you to visit.

The only time that will get complicated is if we try to be too idealistic about it. Going down that road would involve us excluding anything that didn't fit into a universally agreed upon idealised notion of what a real photograph is. We should be looking to do as little excluding as possible. Put another way, we should be leaning towards being as accommodating as possible, without going so far that the concept of photography becomes meaningless.

It's probably easier and simpler if we start by defining what a photograph is not, which in this case would specifically be images generated from scratch by AI software or computer graphics software. That would mean using the medium of origin as one of the defining factors (but not the only one). In the spirit of keeping things simple, where photographs are concerned we could define the medium of origin as "photographic equipment", which, from a photographer's point of view means cameras, including cameras built into non-camera devices such as phones.

The definition of "photograph" could then realistically include composites (which may or may not include AI generated elements). Photography has a long history of including composites of various types.

Just because a photo has been given some post processing, that needn't mean that we have to stop referring to it as a photo. All photos (digital and analog) have to be given some kind of processing, whether it's in camera or in a computer or a dark room, so the idea that any post processing is a no-no is not realistic.

We would still have to allow for the possibility of photographs being extensively modified. It should be up to the individual to decide whether they felt the need
for disclosure in such matters. The alternative would be to exclude extensively modified photos and then we are left with the problem of where to draw the line.
Those who felt the need for disclosure could refer to such images as "modified photos" which would cover all possibilities.

If someone had the intention of producing a creatively edited image from a photo, the chances are they wouldn't want to refer to it as a photo anyway, so getting precious about such definitions would seem to be futile and trivial.

What's the definition of a photograph? To answer that there are two possibilities - we can be idealistic or we can be realistic. Perhaps to be clear we should specify that we're looking for a working definition. In that context, being realistic would seem to be the better choice. That involves being flexible and accommodating and making sensible assessments. Some people aren't very good at any of those things and they prefer the rigid exclusiveness of idealism. The down side is that being rigid and exclusive is the option that's least likely to produce a working, real world definition.

The possibility of deception will be with us no matter what definitions we choose. For those who feel the need for disclosure there's no problem because there's nothing stopping them. For those who have the intention to deceive, they don't care what the agreed definitions are.