In the early 1980s, a teacher refused to let me word-process my homework (my penmanship was shit) on the grounds that I shouldn't be able to produce a paper at the touch of a button.

Upper management look at AI end results and imagine a similar scenario: they don't see the human effort behind the dumb-waiter and imagine a clerk can just tell an LLM to make me a sequel to Dumbo without getting very specific and then having a team of reviewers watch hundreds of terrible elephant films to curate the few good ones.

But what is telling is how our corporate bosses responded to the prospect of automated art. Much like the robot pizza company who did not automate the process and pass the savings on to you! (his offerings were typical pizza at typical prices and he kept all the savings for himself) our senior execs imagine ways to replace workers with cheaper automation rather than producing better stuff or cheaper movie tickets for their customers.

So maybe we should growl at them and change the system before they figure out how to actually pay fewer people while keeping more profits.