It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.
But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.
> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.
High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.
TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.
Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.