To put it another way, it's like how the best chess AIs are so stupidly superhuman that no biological organism could even conceivably defeat the best ones available. The result of this on chess as a game industry? It's actually made humans better players.

It's not a 1:1 comparison because playing a game isn't the same as "the application of higher cognition for entertainment." But I am starting to seriously think that I vastly overcalled the death of the entertainment industry. I suppose I should have been more nuanced, as I still think that the industry as it is now is horribly bloated and exploitative and AI will end that aspect of it.

But, see if you can follow me here, if I had the ability to generate a movie on my computer that looks like it had the entire GDP of Earth put into its budget (but only cost a few cents to generate), and I heard that some filmmakers dedicated to doing things the old-fashioned way were setting out to make movies with actual human actors and practical effects/legacy CGI.... I'd actually set out good time in the day to watch that movie too. Even if I could recreate that exact movie, frame by frame, on my computer.

Even if that movie was terrible, I'd still watch it if I knew it was genuinely human-crafted. Sort of like how I'd pay money even for a crappy glass if it was hand-crafted by a human.

It's nowhere near enough to sustain the industry as it exists now, hence why I have to say "expect downsizing," but I'm completely cutting out my earlier predictions that the entertainment industry is doomed. Even art as career isn't going to die.

All this is really meant to be a reassurance to artists fearing their obsolecense. If "The Synthetic Media Guy" is saying "Lol actually plenty of you are gonna be alright," I'd start calming down.

I like to think of it as a bell curve. On the left end, the uneducated broke take is that "AI will never replace humans completely, even if it's perfect." In the middle, as a result of knowledge and enlightenment and awareness, there's "AI is going to replace creatives first, and the human entertainment industry is going to die, and everything ever will be an anime tailored to my tastes and I'll never look back." And on the right, following the come-down and when you achieve nirvana, there's "AI will never replace humans completely, even if it's perfect." Just expect a lot more AI-generated stuff in the coming years regardless.