They talked about it with knitting: obviously, buying yarn is a time-saving efficiency compared to spinning your own, but that didn't destroy the meaning of the gift. Nevertheless, if I spent time spinning my own yarn and gifting it to my mother, I bet she would find it meaningful.
Similarly, they talk about how they could use a mechanical knitter to save time, but that would reduce the meaning. I think that depends. If I designed a beautiful pattern and then used a mechanical knitter to create a blanket, I bet my mom would find it meaningful.
The epiphany is that meaning doesn't come from how hard I work. It comes from personal relationship and how my actions interact with that relationship. If I knew my mom was looking for a specific, somewhat rare purse, and one day I happened to find it at a yard sale and give it to her, that would be a meaningful gift, regardless of how much effort it took me.
Meaning is not an intrinsic quality of objects. It is not an arrangement of atoms or a quantum field. You can't see meaning in a microscope. Meaning is only in our heads. And because it is only in our heads, AI can't destroy it.
AI is just a tool, like a mechanical knitter or a jackhammer. Sure, maybe not all tools are equally useful for creating meaning, but no one ever worried that meaning was under threat because jackhammers got invented. AI is no different.