If you're in OpenAI's position, the PR from the group you're disrupting is rarely relevant. People from the outside will (correctly or not) look at this as "Mathematicians don't want OpenAI to solve problems to keep their status/jobs", and you'll have as much sympathy from them as every other replaced profession in human history - very little to none.

Unlike AlphaFold, this technology has the potential to wholesale replace the entire profession. You're never going to get anything more than bad PR from that group as the threat looms.

Over 3 Billion images gets generated per week via OpenAI chatgpt image models. None of the poor PR from artists on AI generated images even remotely matters.