I would hope that people with strong opinions about the uses and abuses of AI would start their own firms and hire people who are unwilling to use AI for whatever reasons. The competition should go a long way to proving the naysayer's points or disproving them. Personally, I think there is no evading the AI juggernaut and that artistic metrics or excellence metrics are going to take a back seat to pure shipping garbage faster metrics. The garbage will be come the new baseline of excellence and the former measures of excellence will be cottage industry artisanship with small and dedicated audiences.
As a small data point, I don't think AI can make movies worse than they currently are. And they are as bad as they are for commercial but non-AI reasons. But if the means to make movies using AI or scene-making tools build with a combo of AI and maybe game engine platforms puts the ability to make movies into the hands of more artistic people, the result may be more technologically uninteresting but nonetheless more artistically interesting because of narrative/character/storytelling vectors. Better quality for niche audiences. It's a low bar, but it's one possible silver lining.
This is equivalent to suggesting (in a world without IP law) that the supporters of such a system ought to start competing firms that refuse to copy things without providing compensation in order that the competition might demonstrate the benefits of the system. Of course without the regulation neither of those systems is likely to be part of a viable business model.
That said I agree with your second paragraph. I think we will see an explosion of high quality niche products that would never have been remotely viable before this.
a similar inflection point happened in the history of film? because cheap prurient material was faster to produce and did generate commerce quickly.. much faster than say, an epic drama with 3000 extras, costumes and theme musics.. The Film Code in American did happen, was widely mocked, and probably was very responsible for the flourishing of an entire industry to the public for decades..
People left alone for a race to the bottom, does not end well, it seems..
Why won’t luddites open their own factories, amirite? They would if they had money.