Do you believe it's a good thing that all software is becoming noticeably lower quality? Do you believe it's a good thing that open source is on its death bed now that licenses don't mean anything and popular projects are drowning under AI generated PR spam? Even here on HN, Show HN is effectively dead as almost every single submission is some boring garbage generated in 30 minutes that nobody cares about, not even the person who submitted it.
Experts don't need to have a moat built around them, because they build their own moats with their skills and efforts. Just because you get jealous and feel entitled to the fruits of the experts' labor while being unwilling to put in the same work does not mean you have the right to steal their work and mix it up in a computer algorithm so you can later claim it as yours.
The upside? A new generation of content creator who may profit from automation.
We never had problems creating art. In fact, what's artistic is relative to the effort involved in the creation process; also, access to technology available at the time.
To me the argument is valid. It's devaluing the skills of existing artists, and the decade long investment they likely put into their craft.
The slop isn't coming, it arrived decades ago. The Pandora's box of slop is already open. Maybe AI widens the aperture, but if you cannot handle the discernment required to separate slop from something useful or meaningful, that is your problem.