There's also another side of it: there's a legitimate case for places where we don't need high quality creativity.

We have a world of clip art and stock photos. A lot of this is not best effort-- people grab what's in the catalog, and the catalog is itself often either mediocre or overused to the point where it's a blatant signal of low-effort. If you want a smiling washing machine to put on a flyer for the building's laundry room, or a generic photo of St. Basil's for an article about Russia, nobody really complains about that.

AI could fill a similar niche. We know it's crap, but it's good enough crap. Except it's absurdly expensive crap when the externalities are actually priced in.