Gen-AI images masquerading as photography are slop regardless of whether they are aesthetically pleasing or technically correct. As soon as you know the situation depicted never happened, no one witnessed it, what you’re seeing is a meaningless, derivative mishmash of other photographs. It’s reduced to pretty lights on a screen. If that wasn’t true, why wouldn’t gen-AI “photographers” proudly disclose that their image was produced with AI?

And they can win competitions because photo competitions are usually already within the realm of derivative.