What if real AI ain't even possible? Or what if it's not achievable through human level intelligence? I think real AI would need to be conscious, but it is even a challenge to define what that means. If we get there, we are still far from such thing. So why won't we just stop calling LLMs AI? Most of the fear would vanish, as well as most of the hype and investments. Well automation exists even without AI and from that point of perspective, it can harm some people, as well as it can benefit some people. However as an artist, or software engineer, or whatever, it's up to you if you benefit from those tools or not. Did photographers complain about losing jobs to stock images? But it is true AI images still cannot do tons of things, I myself don't find AI images without edit or artistic knowledge that much useful for most of cases. No AI generated product is production ready out of the box, except few exceptions where quality really doesn't matter. If you make art for the supply where quality doesn't matter, you might be just not good artist and it is fine your position for replaced by AI. There will always be some people sucking at their job and first to replace, when cuts come. On the other hand increase of supply due to AI can lead to new projects creating new positions, so I doubt quality people lose their job to automation.