What caused textile machines to replace the manual labor wasn’t the quality of their output, it was quantity. In fact, manually made clothing was of higher quality than what was machine-produced.
Low quality software kills people.
Both will stay manual / require high level of review they're not what's being disrupted (at-least in near term) - it's the rest.
What was automated was the production of raw cloth.
This phenomenon is a general one… chainsaws vs hand saws, bread slicers vs hand slicing, mechanical harvesters vs manual harvesting, etc.
A large enough GDPR or SOX violation is the boogeyman that CEO's see in their nightmares.
The machines we’re talking about made raw cloth not clothing and it was actually higher quality in many respects because of accuracy and repeatability.
Almost all clothing is still made by hand one piece at a time with sewing machines still very manually operated.
“…the output of power looms was certainly greater than that of the handlooms, but the handloom weavers produced higher quality cloths with greater profit margins.” [1]
The same can be said about machines like the water frame. It was great at spinning coarse thread, but for high quality/luxury textile (ie. fine fabric), skilled (human) spinners did a much better job. You can read the book Blood in the Machine for even more context.
If your goal is to make 1000 of the exact same dress, having a completely consistent raw material is synonymous with high quality.
It’s not fair to say that machines produced some kind of inferior imitation of the handmade product, that only won through sheer speed and cost to manufacture.
AI slop code doesn't even work beyond toy examples.