Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever

That’s the problem - it take a lot of practice and experience to get really good at graphic design or illustration. When people are paying you to do it, you can afford to do it all day. If not, you need to spend the majority of your time doing something else, so it takes longer to advance in skill. I see this in my own field with hobbyists/people who do art on the side vs people who do it full time.

It will mean that not only do you need to compete with your peers, you'll need to compete forever with all the best talent that has ever worked.

And those talents, at a certain point, will cost less. They'll be able to do more for less money because they'll be on to other things or dead, and thus are handling their living (or not) expenses differently. While you'll still need an apartment near the studios and food to survive.

There's no real up side for 99.99% of people. The only ones who will make any real money from these changes are the executives and producers.

Most artists can't earn their entire livelihood by their craft alone. Even those considered good, in most cases, need a main job.

But even the little money you make from your art can at least pay for art supplies (which are very expensive). Learning to be a good in your craft costs an enormous amount of patience, time and money as well. With no money at all to be made out of it, no commissions, and your work immediately flowing into the AI pipeline, new artists will be further discouraged from even trying to hone that craft.

Factories employ a fraction of people they did before the 80s.

Depends on the industry. Automobiles? Yeah, that has been largely automated. Trailers? The most common trailer brands I can think of are still built manually.

CNC machines still need operators, and those operators are still doing manual labor. An entire factory only needs one guy on a computer to manage all the programing those CNC machines need. Everything else is about making sure the material is correctly positioned and the machine is working correctly.

Manufacturing isn't nearly as automated as you might think. Not as many industries have adopted the rote programing robotic arms that you're imagining from some Ford production line.

Plus factories and industrial are only a fraction of the manual labor world. Agriculture, construction, forestry, trades, all sorts manual labor jobs exist that have nothing to do with factories. And that's not even counting other unskilled labor fields like the service industry.

There is still a lot of hard manual (and underpaid) work left that AI and robotics sadly did not replace. Instead it seems to go for the jobs some people actually might enjoy first.

I feel online platforms like the Fediverse are a conceivably bad place to discuss this, though. Because I assume a lot of people here do work in technical jobs they often enjoy at least a bit.

But a huge chunk of people works in delivery, in warehouses, at assembly lines, as cleaners, in construction, the not so nice parts of elderly care, etc. etc.

"I'm thinking, muscular, gruff looking white man who loves his kids".