The viral Monumental Labs Instagram post showing robotic reproduction of Michelangelo's David sparked global debate about artificial intelligence (AI)'s role in art creation, garnering 2.9 million views and revealing deep cultural tensions around technological intervention in creative practices. Building upon the aforementioned discourse, and approaching this unique opportunity, this paper aims to examine how artistic expertise shapes public reception of automated art production. This research uses a mixed-methods analysis of 1,437 organic social media comments, combining automated sentiment analysis with human-coded thematic categorization across six professional artist categories. Comments were systematically filtered from 2,913 initial responses and analyzed using two-way ANOVA, chi-square tests, and qualitative discourse analysis to examine relationships between artistic identity and technological reception. Results illustrate that while both artists (-0.289) and non-artists (-0.272) showed negative sentiment on average, Fine Arts & Traditional Media practitioners expressed significantly more negative attitudes than Digital & Multimedia Arts professionals (p=0.041). Professional background significantly predicted comment themes (χ²=69.07, p=0.038, Cramér's V=0.155), with traditional artists emphasizing authenticity concerns and skill preservation, while digital artists focused on technical innovation and collaboration advocacy. In conclusion, artistic identity influences both the emotional depth and the conceptual structures used to assess technological integration in arts. Traditional artists express their concerns using philosophical concepts like ‘soul’ and ‘authenticity’ while non-artists emphasize concrete attributes such as ‘handmade’ features. These results are significant for cultural organizations and technology firms involved in the incorporation of artificial intelligence into creative processes.