My opinion on the problem of "too much content to watch in several lifetimes" will not be solved on the supply side, but the demand side.
All content is not created equal: we are social animals and what people around us do interests us much more, even if it is of lower quality. So, if anyone can generate professional-looking creative projects with relative little effort, we'll gravitate towards people creating content on niche subjects that interest us; thus creating small communities with high engagement. Even if they have low watch count, they'll matter to those participating in them. Fanfic communities already work that way.
There always be a place for conventional mainstream media outlets creating run-of-the-mill high-production-value works, with themes averaged to appeal to the masses; it's just that they'll have a lot more competition from communities of the first type.
Consider the extreme low quality visuals of SouthPark. They used their low quality imagery as joke enhancement for their presenting ideas far more sophisticated than the majority of animated media.
I might be wrong, but I could imagine that AI will push the absoulute maximum out of human creativity. To beat AI, you'll truly need to make something outstanding and I think there will be people achieving that and truly pushing the boundaries of creativity and art forward, in ways we haven't seen before. And those people will be rewarded. Everyone will have to step up their game.
Probably, artists will use AI not to "beat" it, but as a base tool for exploring the space of possibility and expanding it into new territories. People will see AI as just one more tool in the toolbox.
People using Dall-E or Midjourney naively will be like those unremarkable classicism painters in the late XIX century doing realistic yet conventional paintings which nowadays you can create as studio photographs.
Meanwhile, brilliant artists will train new AI models throwing in data collections that have never been seen before as their training input, to generate completely new styles - just like the -ism movements threw all academic conventions away in pursue of new art styles, bringing us modern and postmodern art.
All content is not created equal: we are social animals and what people around us do interests us much more, even if it is of lower quality. So, if anyone can generate professional-looking creative projects with relative little effort, we'll gravitate towards people creating content on niche subjects that interest us; thus creating small communities with high engagement. Even if they have low watch count, they'll matter to those participating in them. Fanfic communities already work that way.
There always be a place for conventional mainstream media outlets creating run-of-the-mill high-production-value works, with themes averaged to appeal to the masses; it's just that they'll have a lot more competition from communities of the first type.