Yeah, its like this
-Support the Blacksmiths, cars are undercutting the horse shoe industry!
-That car is clearly just a copy of an existing car, so cars are bad!
-Someone stole my car and is selling it, the car sales industry is bad!
There is often a part of truth in complaints, but the conclusions people then draw are wild.
That's a good example, but yeah, I think most of the hate/confusion comes from calling them "AI artists" or suggest in any way that AI is going to kill and replace artists, which couldn't be further from the truth.
Were "AI artists" called anything else, it'd solve most of the misunderstandings, I believe.
At the very least you'd need to at least try AI yourself to realize that AI will never be able to replace artists, and I'm not talking just about the technical mistakes that might be gone someday, but things that AI can't and never will be able to do.
So, at best, it can only devalue artists, which is not a bad thing. Some of them are abusive and overpriced.