There is a fundamental value assigned to human produced work that stems strictly from the fact it’s not AI slop. It comes from empathy.
Why are physical paintings more valuable than digital art? Why is manmade art implicitly higher value than imagegen art? Why do we watch Magnus Carlsen when engines are leagues ahead of the top 10?
Because the human condition matters. We crave seeing the world through the eyes of others with different (or even similar) lived experiences, fantasizing about what we could have been, under different circumstances. Empathizing. AI fundamentally has experienced nothing and so empathizing is not possible. It is not even able to escape the constraints of the human imagination.
Consider a Turing test, though. Imagine you had two novels in front of you, you read both of them, and they were brilliant. You love them both. But you learn that one of them was written by a human, one of them by an AI. Is the AI-written novel actually inferior, because it was written by an AI, despite the fact that you loved the novel itself?
You might doubt that an AI can ever write a novel as great as the greatest of human writers. I have doubts as well. But I don't think it can be a priori inferior. If an AI ever produces a novel that would have been great if a human wrote it, then that will be a great novel.