I believe it was the first. And the rumors I've heard is that Shatner purposefully flubbed all the takes without it, so they had to use it in the episode. (Don't have a source for these claims this early in the morning.)

The other aspect is LLMs further reduce art to content. Corporations were already more or less doing this (what are the artistic merits of another season of Survivor?) but LLMs accelerate this trend of just producing more images/text/video that corporations can sell or advertise.

If it's any help, I adore that book and the argument it makes. It quieted a lot of unfounded questions I had around immigration that had mostly been planted by the major media narratives and not by actual consideration. Thanks for writing it.