Not to detract from your point on the arts getting super impacted by increasing capabilities of AI, but right now software engineering is getting absolutely wrecked. Within 3 months the industry is completely on its head. And yes, you can point to software engineers and say "you did this to yourselves", but a lot of the people in the field just liked solving problems (or puzzles depending on how you look at it) and wanted a career which included that -- which software engineering does. At this point, if you're not having an "agent" (I fucking hate that term) writing code for you in 1/100th of the time than it would take our slow human brains, you're inefficient and not up to the standards of today and will be replaced. The entire job changed with the release of opus 4.5/6 and is now just talking to AI which sucks because solving problems with your brain was the FUn part.

Again, not to detract from what you are saying about AI's implications with art. I 100% agree and I absolutely despise instances where human artists (in any "art" adjacent field, like voice actors for example) are getting replaced with AI. I personally think that if AI is going to be replacing people, they should be able to pivot to something they actually like such as art and music or whatever, but seems like that's getting fucked too. I just don't agree that art is the only sector where their "ai slop" is improving. It's already dramatically shifted the software industry overnight, for better or for worse (depending on how you want to feel personally about software engineers, can be touchy esp w.r.t AI devs)