Even as a big supporter of image gen ai, I don't like realistic "photos". I remember hitting photorealism and proudly showing them to my wife and she goes "awe

Even as a big supporter of image gen ai, I don't like realistic "photos". I remember hitting photorealism and proudly showing them to my wife and she goes "awesome, where is this?" Something about the fact that these were completely fake and not real absolutely sunk the value of them for me. It's a fraud - there's no history in the image, no true cultural value. It's not a capture of a place or emotion, it's a mimic. The architecture not real, the people never existed, the animals incorrectly visualized, the light doesn't behave as real light would etc etc. I think the sweet spot currently is in obviously fake stylized images or illustration/3dish type stuff. I know artists reject that, but I think it will eventually become a paintbrush of sorts for them, not replacing them anymore than code gen ai replaces software engineers. Another angle on it - I think there's something really wrong consuming fake images of real life but thinking they're real. It's like the visual equivalent of artificial cancer causing sweetener. I would want to know if the blog image I'm looking at is ai generated or not.