alt Hacker NewsI understand what you mean but speakers and recording equipment destroyed the economics of paying people to play music a long time ago.
It's another way of looking at the problem.
Smartphone cameras and easy-to-use professional equipment were thought to destroy the photography profession, yet photographers still exist, although we have to admit not as many as in the past.
If I had a company with a budget, I wouldn't waste my time using Claude to create art, even if it meant I could do all myself.
Certainly people who earned top dollar for doing something that AI can easily do now are going to be displaced, however the world of top dollar business has never been that big for the middle class of artists to begin with.
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Sure, this mirrors history, technology is always transforming economics.
I guess my point is that there is a decent sized middle class of creative professionals right now, and I expect that the number of them will go down significantly due to AI. Seems like art will become more and more restricted to hobbyists and the lucky few who achieve mainstream success.
This is kind of what happened with photography. But I think the scale is much bigger, affecting all creative industries.
FWIW smartphones did massively change the economics of being a photographer. The family photographer used to be a reliable profession and now it's just a side thing that event and wedding photographers do.