Comments like these are kind of straw man rebuttals imo. There have been similar arguments such as 'electronic music didn't destroy musicianship', 'photography

Comments like these are kind of straw man rebuttals imo. There have been similar arguments such as 'electronic music didn't destroy musicianship', 'photography didn't destroy art', etc. They skirt around the important details, in that in all those analogies the entire process/field wasn't replaced/impacted by automation, only facets. Advanced generative NNs aren't merely dumb automated tools that still require human craftmanship but rather, at a baseline, take the place of the humans in virtually all respects of design, implementation and continually synthesizing based on others' work. The analogy presented in your post doesn't account for the designers still involved with the process, the real-world practicalities that involve humans of getting clothing made even with all the automation available. Generative AI doesn't have this goal; it's increasingly allowing for replacement of all humans and processes involved, besides the one wishing upon a genie lamp. Now one can of course apply their own craftsmanship to such outputs if desired and there are examples of this from existing artists/writers where it fits more like a tool into a workflow (and such analogies would actually apply here), however as we can already observe the vast majority of uses don't and there is still at a minimum a usable result, as the tech advances. There are also parallels one commonly reads drawn to how humans operate: if a human studied others' artwork then they too would be able to synthesize results. However no human has memory and mind's eye recall like that of advanced NNs, which is plainly observable from the output of human history. It's an unfair comparison. The goal of generative models is to be superhuman yet only human arguments are being applied. I think there are a bunch of positives and negatives to this but it's hard not to see the impact it will have particularly on human motivation and societal expectations, regardless of financial incentives, apart from the general shut-up-and-take-it attitude one sees. There are some pretty impactful legitimate concerns to be had that warrant thoughtful discussion.