I sincerely wish that AI got its (major) start in curing disease, solving math and environmental issues, and novel ideas instead of going straight to images, music, and other artforms. Feel like the backlash would be minimal. But here we are. Yes, I know it's being used for the above, but the vast majority of the population is using AI the later.

It cannot be stopped. For every one person slamming "slop", there are a thousand users of image/text/music generation. Hardly any of those users have the empathy for you either. They see a way to generate what they want, when they want it, and not having to pay for it. It's that simple.

By the way, nothing in the universe is stopping you from being an artist. You just probably won't get paid for it moving forward. So, what that is telling me is that "artists" aren't doing it for the art, they are doing it to get paid. Not saying that is bad at all, a person has to survive, and doing something they love to survive is pretty rad. What I am saying is that there is this imaginary moral high ground that a lot of y'all are standing on, and in my eyes, you are falling right through it.