Why not?
Photography is a specialized skill that requires hard technical knowledge and experience, that people misunderstand, frequently as being too easy and accessible.
Generating images with AI is a specialized skill that requires hard technical knowledge and experience that people frequently misunderstand as being too easy and accessible.
If you can reduce one to "it's just pressing a button," and the other to "it's just a few words, dude" you've got the same problem going on in both places.
Although, if we're being honest, modern AI art workflows look more like Blender or Nuke than they do traditional photography.
The answer of course, is education, understanding how stupid it is to make ignorant, simplified over-generalizations.
If you want, Michael. I could show you how to do it. I'll block off a sunday on my schedule walk you through the whole process.
It's not as bad as you think.
Yeah no, while photographers do press a button to take a picture they have to know about lighting, composition, color theory, aperture, ISO, shutter speed, formatting…. I can go on.
Do not compare using AI to Photographers.