AI shouldn't have a drastic effect on photography. Daguerreotypists probably complained that the ambrotype and Tintype weren't pure photography. How these photographers may have railed against the introduction of glass plate negatives, which enabled mere darkroom workers to produce endless numbers of prints and cartes-de visites! A few years later, adding clouds from a different negative in the darkroom added the appearance of reality to otherwise bland Civil War photos. Around this time, photographs assembled small images of celebrities into one large image, obviously an unreal assemblage. These advances in just the first generation of photography may have seemed more revolutionary at that time than the AI generation or alternations of today.
One of my most popular darkroom prints required about an hour of wrestling with Spotone for each print. Now, less effort expended one time with the Spot Healing Brush Tool in a 15-year-old version of Photoshop elements suffices for all eternity (or how ever long a digital file lasts). True, each contemporary digital print of that subject lacks that hour of drudgery, but the print is otherwise more perfect. We should welcome or reject advances in photo-related technology, but why argue about them? For most of us on this forum, making photographs is a lot more rewarding than quibbling over techniques that we may never use.