This was always going to happen eventually, and you will never be able to stop technological progression over some huffing about ethics. So its an entirely moot point regardless.

I concern myself with how these things look further down the line, and I without a doubt think that establishing certain protections is absolutely necessary. I have warned my peers for years but nobody listened - they got off on platitudes "oh our work has soul!" - turns out, good work isn't as in demand as they thought. Cat is mostly out of the bag and they have been Johnny Come-Latelys' about it. I welcome the death of the casual smut artist.

Digital art was always going to end up devalued like this because it lacks the scarcity value a physical piece has to create an inherent worth.

Maybe. I think there are other ways to protect your work, or even collaborate in some way to feed a machine within one's own art collective and lease its use. As for junk art, I fear that junk art is king - it will continue to be king and the world will be uglier for it and I have my reasons for hating this.

I do sincerely believe that aesthetics have an effect on cohesion, and by proxy, epigenetics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5599588/

Above is a study done adjacent to the rat utopia to give you a picture of what I mean, in that spiteful mutations when introduced to homogenous populations ruins social hierarchies - and likewise has numerous biochemical repercussions, such as the lowering of testosterone. It's a terrifying thing to know how these things interconnect and how little people actually care. Aesthetics make no small difference either because they are what we collectively value, we are in this sense under the indelible influence of our surroundings. Art is the thing that all kingdoms and empires have left behind as their greatest treasures - what succeeds us? Trash. I plan to dig up some papers on that tonight because there is something to be said about it in relation to this - namely the affect that hierarchies can have on the biochemistry of the individual. Context creates people, and I fear the affects of hierarchy created by a constant bombardment of junk and misappropriated skill. I fear the collective culture of art as a profession in the hands of an even nastier commercial gatekeeper.

It's just going to get worse.

Does a digital piece have inherent worth?

About as much as a photo - which also have considerable legal protections and royalties behind them depending on where it is acquired. Also contributing to the inherent worth of a digital piece is the skill and demand of the artist himself, and this sets the stage for how you would arrange a contract. But by in large I think it is just as important to the value of your work that you protect your intellectual property - yet, artists have been foolhardy, posting their shit everywhere and wantonly skimming past the end user agreements. Fools, all of them.

Something like Discord could tomorrow pull the rug out from under them and say "hey, all this shit belongs to us - we're gonna use all of it to create promotional work and you won't see a red cent. Good'ay!" Facebook can do that with family photos if they had the itch, and I think everyone would feel weird about that.