Comment by DrewADesign

More like the American manufacturing sector that was sold out because executives liked money more than the people that built their company. They were wrong then, are wrong now, and now the US manufacturing sector is irreparably harmed because of it. Following investor profit at the expense of everyone and everything else isn't the inevitable, natural path of progress-- every day we walk down this path mindlessly chasing profit at the expense of commercial artists is a deliberate choice. Beyond that, cars, trucks, and busses were FAR more of an improvement over animal-powered transportation, while the current LLM and image-generating NN stuff is choking the internet with complete garbage made by hucksters trying to make a cheap buck by fooling people into thinking there's something valuable on the other side of a link. ::slow clap:: Then there's the scammers, extortionists, political disinformation peddlers, etc. Now that's what I call progress!

The American creative sector is going to atrophy exactly as the American manufacturing sector did. The whole idea that "well everybody's still gonna do art" isn't going to save the best cohort of commercial artists in the world any more than hobby home machinists saved America's collective knowledge of tool and die making.