AI slop is flooding the zone

There are two accounts of the negative effects for humanity of the explosion of generative AI: one minatory, one trivial. The minatory, the existential, version of it is that AI will poison the information ecosystems on which our democracies depend, crash our economies by doing a very large number of us out of a job, give every lunatic and terrorist the means to engineer novel pathogens at home, and administer the coup de grâce by sending terminators into our recent pasts and/or overstocking the cosmic stationery cupboard by turning all of us into paperclips.