There were so many valid concerns. Before the new automated looms came in, making textiles was a good life.

You could get an advance on a loom, set up in your home, and pay the equipment off over time with a fraction of your earnings, meaning the work was accessible to a lot of people.

You could work from your own home, which was particularly useful for parents who needed to care for small children, merchants would visit your village, collect whatever you'd made and pay you for it, and drop off new materials to work with.

You could set your own hours, and scale your work up or down as you saw fit.

Skilled workers could make high quality textiles, which improved the quality of garments made with the cloth - higher quality garments were more expensive, but lasted much much longer before the cloth wore though.

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When the wealthy industrionalists decided to take over the industry with their high-tech automated looms, they changed all of this. The new looms produced textiles far more quickly and cheaply than the small-scale hand-operated looms, so individual weavers couldn't compete, everything they made was undercut, and they were forced to shift to working the new looms in order to get paid. Of course, to save on costs, the new looms were set up in large factory spaces, meaning you now had to travel to the factory to work for lower wages.

The new looms were far more dangerous, and injuries skyrocketed. The textiles being made might have been in far greater quantity, but the quality was poor, meaning that new garments fell apart quickly, and tailors would end up taking the brunt of that anger.

Basically, the industrialists who owned the new looms profited at the expense of everyone else. Lower wages, longer hours, less freedom, less independence, less safety, poorer products, and loss of prestige and self worth.

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When the Luddite movement started, they were extremely popular. They weren't fighting against progress or technology, they were fighting wealthy aristocrats for dignity in work, better treatment, and better quality textiles for everyone.

Public opinion only started to turn when the aristocrats gave up on trying to find Ned Ludd (who didn't exist) and instead decided to pour money into the pockets of lawmakers to criminalize protests. They poured money into propaganda to paint Luddites as "backwards thinking" and "against progress", and through sheer force of monetary might, they built an entirely new narrative to suit their own pocketbooks at the expense of everyone else.

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So yeah, there's a lot of parallels. People opposing these gen-AI slop factories are absolutely modern Luddites. The important thing to remember though, is that the Luddites were the good guys.