AI is not at a point where it consistently produces enough bangers for people to see it as comparable to conventional (although lets be real, most stuff in a saturated environment is going to be junk/meh and we're only going to talk about high or top picks), but with the right prompts and circumstances it's rather competitive. And this will only change in favor of the AI the longer it goes on unchanged. People's fuss tend to be the ethical concern of how the AI got off its feet in the first place scraping images without consent.
As nature photography goes people are looking for well, actual nature, not whatever a computer ripped up out of other people's pictures. If it serves a clear demonstrative purpose and is clearly tagged as AI it might get less pushback.