The free market is generally pretty good at allocating scarce resources as long as the price reflects that. I don't think the majority of AI usage is really for making AI slop. I think it's far outweighed by passive, unprompted AI usage. For each person generating an AI slop anime girl, there are a hundred people who are simply making a Google Search, and that triggers an AI response whether they want one or not. And a lot of times, AI features which say "click here to generate a summary" or something like that tends to be very wasteful by having each individual user clicking "generate" triggering a separate AI prompt, when they could instead just run the generation once for the first user and then cache the result for everyone else. Instead, every user who clicks "generate" will cause all the computations to be redone. That's incredibly wasteful, and I think it's because AI in general encourages people to be lazy.

I think a lot of progress could be made by simply levying a one-cent tax on AI prompts. Each prompt provided to a large-language model or to an image generation model will incur the tax, which will be used to fund renewable energy projects. That way, the legitimate uses of AI will not be hindered (research, medicine, automating boring tasks, etc.) while the junk "spammy" uses will be filtered out, because you're now forcing any AI query which is made to generate at least one cent of value to society, which is a very low bar to reach but so many AI uses cases surprisingly fail. This also adds friction to each AI interaction, because no company can now afford to give users free AI prompts, which will be great in general for weaning users off the practice of outsourcing their thinking to AIs. Way too many people trust AI for everything, including blindly believe whatever hallucinations it gives you. Adding a paywall to the AI means that you have to really think about whether your use of AI is really actually productive or not before you do so.