Are the pictures I draw and the pictures AI draws really of equal value?

I recently read some documents released by the U.S. Copyright Office regarding copyright for AI-generated works.

The gist was that while using AI itself isn't a problem, there needs to be sufficient human creative contribution to be eligible for copyright protection.

Reading that made me think about things a bit differently.

Aside from the copyright aspect, I wondered—from the viewer's perspective, isn't it enough if you just like the final result?

The truth is, there's so much that goes into completing a piece of art that others never get to see.

Redrawing rough sketches multiple times, switching colors and switching back, or just leaving certain parts as they are because I couldn't get them right even after trying everything.

But when you look at the final image alone, all of that process is invisible. You end up judging it only by the result.

An AI-generated image might be better drawn, and a human-drawn picture might actually look awkward.

So, if we only evaluate the quality of the output, perhaps there's not much reason to distinguish between the two.

But I've found that the reason I fall in love with someone's art isn't always just because of the final result.

I find myself grasping the artist's intent: why they chose those colors, what they tried to fix, what they decided to leave as it was.

And there are moments when all those things accumulate to make a piece truly feel like it belongs to that specific artist.

I'm not saying that AI art should be undervalued.

I'm just not sure yet if it's truly fair to evaluate them by the exact same criteria.