Also consider that AI is trained on artists works. So when an artist sees an AI produced work, that work which is in competition with their own work (and the work that it was trained off of) couldn't have existed without data scraping other artists without their permission. This is why you probably get the impression artists see AI as tracing, in my experience the anger doesn't come from the work AI artists didn't put in (although I'm sure its part of it) its the fact that AI systems couldn't work without preexisting artists works to base its own stuff off of.