You are absolutely, 100% correct. I agree that this is exactly what will happen and what it will mean, to a significant extent.
The solution to that is to unmake or legally restrict AI, and there's no way to get reigns on it now.
This is the same thing that happened with the industrial revolution. What used to be millions of people world-wide that were masters of their craft or trade, replaced virtually overnight by machines that could produce functionally equivalent (if inferior) work at vastly decreased time and cost. It destroyed the cottage industry, upended the economy, and left all of those skilled individuals up the creek without an oar or a prayer. The rich got richer...and...
History is about to repeat itself. Again.
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But, this is also a battle that's been over for quite a long while. This needed to be fought more than 5 years ago, when everyone rolled their eyes at people (like you and me, I believe) concerned about AI becoming too prevalent. (We lost. Long, long ago. This moved at internet speed.)
Plus, since the world did not clamp down on it when it had the opportunity, things like AI generated art, deep fakes, and DLSS 5 became inevitable.
Now that the reality is finally coming into focus, it's also not the end of the world. I can remember in the 1990s people arguing that stuff like digital art programs were going to destroy "real" art. It didn't. It simply made more advanced artistic tools more widely available, and there was still plenty of leeway for ingenuity and creativity. That's what will happen here. Yes, sadly, it will come at the cost of what was once a highly artisinal field being relegated to rank-and-file positions.
Except, of course, for the few visionary artists that saw it coming, who are already imagining ways these new tools can accomplish something no one else will ever see coming.
It's not over. It just banked hard left again, and lots of people are going to go over the side.
