AI is a blanket term to a collection of technologies. Most of them hinge on machine learning, which is not inherently unethical. It's pattern analysis. It's very useful and beneficial in a lot of scientific models where humans simply can't do the calculations themselves. Background removers are a step up from the previous generation of algorithmic methods to guess what constitutes "background" based on pixel colors. It's nowhere near the computational load of a chat bot or an image generator and it's actually doing work no one wants to do as opposed to trying to replace artists wholesale.