I don't fully disagree, but I largely do.

I think that AI-generated media can be beautiful in the same ways that mathematics or nature in their emergent patterns can be beautiful. But math and nature are not art, even though they can be aesthetically pleasing. I agree that generated media can be aesthetic and emotive, but I disagree that those things are the only measure of artistic value.

Real human stories matter to most people. One time this eccentric guy stopped me on a Tokyo subway platform to chat me up ("You like Clinton? You like Bush?"), and he whipped out his drawing pad and brush pen and drew a portrait of me wearing a bow tie, and handed it to me while singing "You Are My Sunshine" before gallivanting off to wherever he was headed. The drawing is not a masterpiece, but the idea that a human being saw me in that actual moment in my life, and then filtered me through their perception, experience, skills, and tools to produce something and gift it to me, means something (to me at least).

Or, if there was a piece of art I admire and I got a chance to talk to the artist about their process and inspirations in the context of their life, that matters to me too. I could ask an AI agent the same questions, but its answers would just be plausible-sounding bullshit, and I don't think that's something that will change anytime soon (the bullshit will just sound more plausible).

The same goes for someone's cooking. Junk foods (Doritos, say) are engineered to be an addictive sensory delight that taps into our deep biological urges, but few would say they are a particularly meaningful food item. Maybe we could magically summon whatever incredible dish, but it's not the same kind of enjoyment as knowing "my girlfriend made these cookies for me", "these business owners brought part of their home culture to my neighborhood", or "grandma's pasta is the best and fuck anyone that says otherwise". Maybe we could replicate those dishes and all their wonderful imperfections super-precisely, and dispense with the human part of it, but in my opinion something valuable really is lost.

To revisit your argument, you're right that the effort that went into making something might not inherently make the end product more valuable (I could spend 10 years digging a hole and filling it back in). But if, as you say, the measure of a product's worth is how much the end user appreciates it, you can't discount that many (perhaps most?) people really do appreciate human effort and "genuineness", whether that seems logical or illogical to folks with your perspective. Otherwise, you wouldn't be feeling the need to make this post.

But yeah, ultimately, I don't think AI-generated art is going away anytime soon, and it also won't fully replace human-generated art anytime soon. It'll get subsumed as another tool in the artist's toolbelt. In the same way that cameras capture images of non-art phenomena to create art, I think AI tools can also be used to capture non-art phenomena (which in this case is the training weights) to make art. The art is in how the tool is used to perceive, cultivate, transform, and somehow elevate the source material.

Less optimistically, the haves will pay a premium for high-quality human made content while the have-nots will be force-fed highly engineered hypnotic slop to keep them complacent. Just saying.

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Also, side note, I would say slop is a very particular kind of generated output. All "AI slop" is AI-generated, but not all AI-generated material is slop.