it has become painfully clear that there is some sort of intrinsic value to the truth of the art, of the experience that creates it, to the backstory that connects it to reality.

This has been a thing for a while now already, even before gen AI in gaming that there often was, for a lot of people a preference to playing with others, as in various games any npc AI, or randomly generated events (like in skyrims dynamic quests) were seen as less interesting than real human interactions/created things.

Think this is a typo btw:

Hidu pantheon

The argument goes that we're seeing an exponential increase in the rate of technological development.

Also interesting to note that the evidence so far is at max N=1.