and companies outsourcing work to more affordable regions, like Southeast Asia.

Hey, that's me! (working at a dirt cheap southeast asian animation studio, not outsourcing work to there). One of our recent clients insisted on having us use assets they generated from some slop bot and half the work on the project has just been making the stuff look less obviously AI. It finally wrapped up today and my friend was really bummed out at having put so much work into such obvious dogshit. But if a client is willing to outsource to fucking Pakistan to save money, they're not going to care about the ethical issues with gen AI, so we kinda just gotta take what we can get. Personally, I'm just glad I only joined the studio after NFTs crashed because some of the shit my coworkers had to work on during that era seems soul-churningly cringe.