> people (arbitrarily, some could say) value the human production

This is a different argument, going into it would muddy the waters. It would devolve into a debate about how much and what type of input and individual perception. It's also been rehashed a million times since Duchamp thought to put a mass produced urinal on display as a fountain.

> most outputs being mass produced are of a substantially lower quality than people (and what is possible)

Different purposes and mass production does not eliminate the market for artisanal work, it replaces only the limited batch work done by hand previously.

> A problem is people are being tricked into it...

God help anyone who learns how the sausage is made.

> "if you can view this for free, it isn't meant to be sold. If it is sold, I deserve to have my time compensated"

This is mostly a matter for the courts but as long as the works are not being reproduced in whole unattributed or in violation of whatever license they held then it will mostly be allowed. If you look for it, you'll notice that artists "borrow" from each other constantly with no attribution and no payment to the originator. All but the grossest plagiarism goes entirely unpunished because everyone realizes that no one can stand alone. Is it different now that it is being made available as a service? Yes, there are now more legal ramifications due to an audit trail of scraping and purchases combined with the much larger output that can be measured and compared. Does it destroy the commons? No, people will use the outputs in their own work which will be published and become part of the commons just like any new style or media.

> that appears to be a "problem"

It's a solved problem. Synthetic training data is a valuable addition now. It requires a way to validate or rank it but that's not any worse than cleaning and filtering human data.

> conspiratorial thinking

An excellent smokescreen but we've been living in a soup of mass media propaganda for over a hundred years now so there's no denying that influence campaigns exist. Denying that humans act in coordinated ways to influence the opinion of others is absurd when you can get a degree in it, have it as a job title and build a trillion dollar industry on it.

Why Anthropic's filing crushed tech stocks