> People are writing articles like this saying how AI is useless (also, the sarcasm is so spicy), yet I feel this underlying sense of fear towards this. Can they please make up their mind?
I don't see a contradiction here. "LLMs produce low-quality content at extremely low prices" is something that can reasonably inspire both fear and ridicule simultaneously. (A good word for it might be "dystopian".)
> Are they fighting for the right to produce low quality content?
Paying writers is a great way to produce higher-quality content. But even producing low-quality content is better than being a Walmart greeter.
> I was not old enough when internet was coming up, but I wonder if there was a similar tone towards internet when it came along.
I was, and I do not remember such a tone. (There certainly were moral panics over things like children getting access to porn, though.) The difference (to my mind) is that in the early days of the internet, new technology made clear and dramatic improvements in human well-being. Things like email, mapping software, and online shopping let people do things that were difficult, expensive, or impossible before. (Search for "long tail" to find discussion of the latter.) If anything, there was too much derision in the other direction -- the phrase "buggy whip manufacturers" was thrown around quite a bit if you want to hunt down examples.
Over the last 10-15 years, the big new internet-related tech has been much less beneficial. Instead, we've gotten things like the "gig economy", cryptocurrencies, walled-garden app stores, and algorithmic social media feeds. In terms of human well-being, these changes range from ambiguous to terrible. And the whole time, tech companies and VCs have continued crowing about how they're advancing humanity toward the future, with (apparently) very little introspection about failures like "creating a giant get-rich-quick scam that boosts carbon emissions" or "accidentally funneling millions of young men toward white supremacist propaganda", alongside lesser failures like "SEO winning the arms race against search engines" or "creating user-tracking systems that rival the East German secret police for the purpose of ad sales".
Given that context, a new technology that seems like it's designed to drive writers into unemployment while flooding the rest of us with spam is going to get a fair bit of skepticism.