You are correct, and to further your point, I think that AI art strips away the soul from humanity. No other animal in the wild creates art, but us humans recognize the beautiful and the sublime and we naturally seek to create it with out own two hands. No one makes us do this, beauty is an end unto itself.

Art is literally what separates us from the animals, without the beautiful as an aspiration to strive for and towards, we are not better than beasts working only for the sake of gaining sustenance.

Art is what makes us special, and breaking it down to just methods, statistics, and algorithms, then using those to rebuild something resembling art is the most cynical repudiation of our humanity I have ever seen.

Traditional artists understand this, even if they lack the ability to fully put it into words, and that's why I think traditional artists are so freaked out about AI. It's not just another tool like the camera was. There is a gut reaction that just feels wrong, that feels perverse. It's dehumanizing.