Before AI it was possible to "express" yourself to someone else by recommending them a piece of art you liked. There's a lot of art in the world, expressing many different things, so you could actually get across something very specific by being a good curator / recommender.
But nobody would seriously claim that they were actually creating, painting with a broader brush at a "book level" instead of a "word level" when they were just curating good novels.
They didn't create the works they recommend, but they did create the recommendations. AI art is kinda like that, even if you didn't create the work in the dataset. Unfortunately it's also like if the recommendations tried to pass off as original work instead, and didn't actually cite the original work, which I think is a huge reason why people dislike it. I still think it's possible to create art with generative AI, but it takes more than just a prompt, if that makes sense.
I express myself with AI all the time, I just can't share it with anyone because it's banned from all the platforms where I'd care to do so. I don't really write stories without AI anymore, so probably people won't see expressions like that from me again. Maybe you could call that "AI hurts artists", dunno.
