The article is indeed paywalled, and I just don’t care enough to jump through hoops to read it.

AI is new, but slop has always existed. Just think of reality shows, elevator music, reader’s digest, mid-afternoon novelas, generic pop music. There has always been content created for the lowest denominator, specifically for passive consumption, designed to reach the biggest possible audience and with no artistic intentions whatsoever, and a huge quantity of people to mindlessly consume it.