Questions & Concerns about AI in programming

So I think if you're reading this you probably know me and my thoughts on GenAI. I don't like it, don't want it around, etc. Maybe there is a world where the LLM models aren't built on the back of stolen works, doesn't destroy the environment, and doesn't attempt to displace human workers but that isn't the world that we live in. So open and shut case right? Well I'm not naive enough to consider everything in the world in black & white but I also don't know enough about programming so I wish to ask questions. Sorry if it feels devil's advocate, it is mostly from a position rooted starchly in anti-AI but I'm willing to "hear em out" in some cases.

So what spurned this question of morality for me have been watching a Zelda youtuber & streamer. She uses a lot of the recomps, like Dusklight for Twilight Princess. She believes that game experiences should be freed from the shackles of withering old hardware. I too believe in that, but emulators also seemed like the answer for it. I don't really want a different experience then what a person on original hardware had but I can't argue that certain accessibility options are nice to see, such as a toggle that changes out the spiders in Twilight Princess with a floating word art of the word Spider. (For the record, I think spiders are cool but know there are people that can't help but be bothered/scared by them)

So despite Dusklight being in development for 3 years, predating the current "gold rush" or is it clout rush? of recomp projects using AI, there are still contributors to the project that use AI to assist their work. The streamer says there is a difference between AI slop and AI assistance, and since a lot of programming is referencing already completed code and open source projects, they argue that the AI is just optimizing that step in the chain. So my question, and this is a question I'm not answering but instead wishing for input in order to answer for myself, is...

Is there a moral difference between someone without the skills using AI to cobble together something vs a skilled/experienced programmer using AI to optimize their workflow?

I feel like everyone is going to stand somewhere different on this, and currently I stand in the "AI usage is appalling and I don't wish to touch anything touched by it" but I also want to be open minded because history does have a pattern of new techniques and tools being introduced and receiving initial backlash before becoming part of the standard. It's just that, never before has a tool appeared like this which has such a cost regarding our planet on top of being something the higher class wishes to control and subjugate us with by demeaning the labor of artists/musicians/coders.

I feel like there is this weird stance of people going "I'm just using AI to skip the boring, inartistic parts of a craft". The human writer uses AI to generate book covers, the programmer uses AI to generate art assets, the human artist uses AI to generate a portfolio site, the musician uses AI to generate samples. Everyone one of them believing what they do is more important then what other people are contributing. I hate it. I hate seeing it and I feel like people are lumping in coding in this "boring part".

I am tech savvy enough to know that LLMs predate this current labeling of "AI" or "Super Intelligence" or whatever shit the "true believes" are calling it this month. I also know computers are good at crunching numbers, comparing data, rifling through code to find errors or discrepancies. So why not let the computer do the "time consuming" or "boring" parts?

My worry is that, if you are using AI to go grab working/tested code for you to fill the gaps of your knowledge set with, do you even know where this code is coming from? Do you know what it is doing? Can you properly credit and attribute those that did the "hard/boring" part already? Can you learn from this or do you simply paste it in and get back to work on what you consider the real task is? Won't over reliance on the AI start creeping into the tasks that you are doing by hand?

We get so wrapped up in the final product of anything. If the art looks good. If the music sounds nice. If the program works. We often seem to lose sight of the journey there. Each skill set wasn't bestowed upon us by some god, no we had to fight and crawl and learn and adapt and scrape until we got where we were. Sure standing on the shoulders of past giants helps but at some point we have to climb even further ourselves, even becoming the giants for the next generation. Are we not setting up new generations of folks content with standing on shoulders, never growing, never becoming future giants? Or is this the logical path for programming to take? We told the computer how to do things and now we are asking the computer to tell the computer how to do things? I don't know.

The reality is that as I write this there is a MiSTer set up on my desk who in recent months has had an explosion of new core releases partially thanks to AI. Translations of Japanese only titles are rapidly being uploaded, sometimes being untested crashing messes that read like a space alien wrote them, and sometimes they are just "good enough" and people are happy because anything is better then nothing to them. Steam Next Fest has double the entrants as last year. People who can't be bothered using emulators can now run console games as if they are native PC programs, with native PC processing bonuses. So much of this is really bumming me out. Am I just working against the current of progress? That AI will be just as ubiquitous to programming as compilers have become? I guess, I don't know how to feel about this and I want some insight, both outside looking in and inside looking out you know. Please help.