There is a fundamental value assigned to human produced work that stems strictly from the fact it’s not AI slop. It comes from empathy.
Why are physical paintings more valuable than digital art? Why is manmade art implicitly higher value than imagegen art? Why do we watch Magnus Carlsen when engines are leagues ahead of the top 10?
Because the human condition matters. We crave seeing the world through the eyes of others with different (or even similar) lived experiences, fantasizing about what we could have been, under different circumstances. Empathizing. AI fundamentally has experienced nothing and so empathizing is not possible. It is not even able to escape the constraints of the human imagination.