At some point in history every human wore clothes that were "hand-made". If we perceive history through the lens of art, we might mistakenly assume that because everyone got to have tailored clothes by professional artisan tailors the likes of which today are highly limited and specialized, that meant that everyone had better clothes.
It's true, tailor was a viable profession, but even then most people couldn't afford them. Families toiled to make their own clothes just as they did to grow enough food not to starve, or find enough fuel to heat their hearths not to freeze.
But there was also still a slice of the classes that could afford tailored clothes when tailors were ubiquitous. And now with the advent of automation no longer can.
Clothing automation made "tailor" no longer a viable profession for the masses, and it reduced the access to hand-made clothing for some people while dramatically increasing the access to clothing for the rest.
The point here is that both perspectives are right. People's lives WILL be ruined. A lack of confidence in the professional arts means that for some time the amount of quality human-generated animation and art will reduce. We may have already passed the peak - the early internet decades when people just put up their art for all to see for free access, not behind paywalls, but just to show that they can. The same art that all the image generation AI tools were trained on.
Will it have been worth it? I genuinely don't know. I'm 40, and I feel like I'm just at the intersection where I start to think that I fear what I don't understand and I invariably think that the way things worked in my 20s was better than the way things will work in my 60s. And yet, this is what has always happened with humanity.
And while the end result of this technology today may end up ruining the livelyhood of animators, legal assistants, and app developers, in the long run, these breakthroughs will end up providing access to more information, knowledge, and access to all of humanity.
Progress is not linear, and comes with tradeoffs. Some things go away and are not always replaced with something better.
But on a humanity time scale beyond the life of an individual human, the development of LLMs is moving us in the right direction.
We need to not lose sight of the macro issues - clean energy, pollution, climate change. We can figure out how to still have tailors and animators in the future. But if we kill all the sharks, dolphins, and polar bears, they're not coming back.