but that isn't the choice, and I don't think that it ever will be. The choice is more like;

Do people want to create for themselves or are they happy to see what already exists by virtue of it already being created by someone else?

People don't only make things for themselves, they make them to share with others. And they tailor things to hopefully attract others. AI is by default a tool to leverage human intent, it doesn't generate things on its own, it generates what humans ask it to. And those humans will have their own goals so there will always need to be someone in the loop to direct the final idea as without it anything an AI makes would be incomprehensible noise.

Do you spend all your time generating random images, having chatGPT write random stories for you to read, or do you also look at images others create or read other people stories?

As long as the answer is the former and not the latter there will always be an industry and that industry will always have a cost and a price.

I don't think this will ever really happen in any large scale way for a few reasons;

People don't actually know what they want in most cases. This is especially true with regards to creativity.

Very few people want to think about what they want to see, they are happy to choose from available options and I will admit that AI generated content will be part of those options at some point in the future, but that is a long way off and people are not going to just stop making all the things they do now. It is far more likely that humans will create most things and then AI will optionally be used to customize them in various ways should someone actually desire it.

To take your example of a movie generation AI, IMO its far more probable that disney will make a movie and you will optionally be able to ask an AI to do things like extent a plot point or make the fights longer. But even that is not really something that most people are going to be willing to do. They just want to see someone else story, they aren't going to write their own.

There are so many things that people "could" do themselves that they choose to pay others to do, if machines can be leveraged to offer more options that is probably a good thing, but to think that the entire entertainment industry will be replaced is IMO silly. There will always be humans in the mix as the machine will never truly know what we want when we barely know ourselves.

I wouldn't say 1000s but its easily 100 every year, there are 1000s of shit scripts that get sent, if there are 100 that could be good, of those there are 20 that get "sold" ( that means someone pays for the IP ) and of those there are 5 that could be be good enough to go live( that means go into production), AI could be the difference between between 2 and 4 of those 5 getting made. it doesn't sound like much but that is absolutely huge when you consider how many people ( HUMANS ) it takes to produce a "low budget" show.

I don't think that AI in and of itself will generate jobs, but it will drop the costs of doing certain tasks by reducing the number of humans required to do the same work today, This will allow more & smaller groups and companies to come in and participate even opening up new things to be created to cater to smaller groups that are ignored today because " the numbers don't work" IE think of every tv show that was killed to soon even though they had pretty good reviews but didn't get 100M views or some other arbitrary metric.

contrived example:

If today it takes at least 1000(it takes way more probably) people to produce all the effects to hit a blockbuster level of quality ( think marvel type movie ), if AI can drop that number to 500 a disney level company would probably either;

A) produce 1 even bigger movie with bigger effects with the same # of people or

B) produce 2 current level productions for the same cost ( both in terms of money and people)

if you agree that this is a probable outcome then it would stand to reason that there would be more smaller projects that would become available because the base level of quality & returns can be met with a smaller team that can produce higher quality things. This would apply not only to art but to many other things.