Sounds more like trolling from people who aren't connected to the art community in the first place. Dave is well known in the krita community for his tutorials and comics, but he has always been staunchly against AI.
So it makes sense trolls would respond this way to demoralize him. His style doesn't even have the rigidity and homogenization that is common to AI image generation. He just paints with very clean rendering and has some surreal themes.