Of course you don't. You're one of the non-creatives who thinks that "prompt engineering" makes you a creative, undoubtedly.

Sure, that's exactly what I believe .. Wow I'm so called out. I use it as a tool to do boring menial tasks so that I can spend my time on more meaningful things, like spending time with my family, making some dinner, spend time on the parts of my work I enjoy and automate the boring tedious parts, like writing boilerplate code that's slightly different based on context.

But the first "L" in "LLM" says it all. The very definition of degenerative AI requires the wholesale dismemberment of human culture to work and, indeed

Can you elaborate on how and the mechanisms by which this is happening as you see? Why do you see it that way? Do you not see any circumstances in which it could be useful? Like legitimately useful? Like have you not written a stupid tedious email to someone you didn't like that you couldn't be bothered to put more than 2 seconds to prompt it to some one or thing else to deal with it for you?

there's already a problem: the LLM purveyors have hit a brick wall. They've run out of material to siphon away from us and are now stuck with only finding "new" ways to remix what they've already butchered in the hopes that we think the stench from the increasingly rotten corpse won't be noticeable.

This is true it's starting to eat its own tail. That also doesn't mean all new models are using new data. It could also be using better architectures on the same data. But yes using ai generated data to train new ai is bad and you'll end up creating nerfed less useful model that will probably hallucinate more. Doesn't mean the tech isn't useful cause you've not seen it used for anything good.