We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on long-term optimal effects.
To be clear: I'm not claiming that AI rollouts won't be billion-dollar failed IT projects! They very well could be. But if that's the case, they aren't going to disrupt the labor market.
Again: you have to pick a lane with the pessimism. Both lanes are valid. I buy neither of them. But recognize a coherent argument when I see one. This, however, isn't one.
Expecting there to be one result from a new technology is incredibly naïve. There are scores of still existing companies today who fumbled the internet, cloud computing, social media, smartphones, etc. even though all of those technologies have proven to be transformative in the aggregate.
AI journalism is strictly worse than having a human research and write the text, but it's also orders of magnitude much cheaper. You see prompt fragments and other blatant AI artifacts in news articles almost every day. So we get newspapers that have the same shape as they used to, but that don't fulfill their purpose. That's a development that was already going on before AI, but now it's even worse.
Walked past a billboard the other day with advertisement that was blatantly AI-generated. Had a logo with visible JPEG artifacts plastered on top of it. Real amateur hour stuff. It probably was as cheap as it looked.
You see the trend in software too. Microsoft's recent track record is a good example of this. They can barely ship a working notepad.exe anymore.
Supposedly some birds will eat cigarette butts thinking they're bugs, and then starve to death with a belly full of indigestible cigarette filters. Feels a lot like what is happening to a lot of industries lately.
I understand there is an argument to be made about what is the "value" of things, but for me it's quite clear that journalism has the inherent value of providing information, similar to how many other activities have values beyond "generating money for their owners". AI allows to "mock" many activities resulting in the social value of that activity being lost, while possibly maintaining the economic value. A trajectory that is not new but also not good to accelerate on.