I think it should be clarified that GIMP's structure isn't able to make use of donations to GIMP as a single entity. Edit: or at least wasn't, I hear they can now.
I agree that Krita is more promising though, I switched to Krita years ago and have never looked back.
From what I understand, GIMP fell behind because it refused corporate donations while Krita accepted them. This lead to GIMP reducing in scope as the 1-3 part-time* developers (at least when I last really looked into it) realised they'd never catch up, leading to people donating less as they weren't satisfied with GIMP's simultaneous underpromising and underdelivering. Meanwhile Krita managed to receive enough money to hire a team of full time developers for several years, leading to better software, to more donations. It's like the poverty trap, but with software.
I think that's more what the people excited about AI think it it is, many of the people who fear it don't really fear its intelligence as much as how it's abused. Personally, I don't even like the machine learning algorithms in social media, despite them being a thing for a long time now.