A scalable image workflow begins with rights, product truth, a source hash, approved transformations, accessibility ownership, and provenance—not a prompt that quietly invents the rest.
There is no reliable one-line answer. Human authorship, generated material, source rights, contracts, publication, trademarks, design patents, territory, and the exact asset must be reviewed separately.
The correct comparison includes loaded labor, review, correction, tools, production, rights, disclosure, adaptation, and failed outputs—not only the price of a generation subscription.