We have been living in a "late-stage capitalism nightmare" for longer than generative AI has been around. We've been on a path towards destroying the world via climate change explicitly because of "human slop" that we could not contain. People's brains have been rotting because we're a few generations deep into mass media producing endless human slop that people are addicted to consuming, and there's been effectively no containment around it.

If you think society prior to ChatGPT was any less off-the-rails than it is now, then you're suffering from recency bias. I'm willing to give you that AI certainly accelerates the slop, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything about humans being unable to regulate their consumption of slop.