There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor. 2. AI is diluting/degrading media culture.
For the first, I'm waiting for more data, e.g. from the BLS. For the second, I think a new category of media has emerged. It lands somewhere near chiptune and deep-fried memes.
The problem is, actually skilled labor - think of translators, designers, copywriters - still is obviously needed, but at an intermediate/senior level. These people won't be replaced for a few years to come, and thus won't show up in labor board statistics.
What is getting replaced (or rather, positions not refilled as the existing people move up the career ladder) is the bottom of the barrel: interns and juniors, because that level of workmanship can actually be done by AI in quite a few cases despite it also being skilled work. But this kind of replacement doesn't show up in any kind of statistics, maybe the number of open positions - but a change in that number can also credibly be attributed to economic uncertainty thanks to tariffs, the Russian invasion, people holding their money together and foregoing spending, yadda yadda.
Obviously this is going to completely wreck the entire media/creative economy in a few years: when the entry side of the career funnel has dried up "thanks" to AI... suddenly there will not be any interns that evolve into juniors, no juniors that evolve into intermediates, no intermediates that evolve into seniors... and all that will be left for many an ad/media agency are a bunch of ghouls in suits that last touched Photoshop one and a half decades ago and sales teams.
Part of learning is doing. You can read about fixing a car, but until you do it, you won't know how it's actually done. For most things, doing is what turns "reading a bunch of stuff" into "skill".
Yet how far will this go? I see a neuralink, or I see smartglasses, where people just ask "how do I do this" and follow along as some kind of monkey. Not even understanding anything, at all, about whatever they do.
Who will advance our capabilities? Or debug issues not yet seen? Certainly AI is nowhere near either of those. Taking existing data and correlating it and discovering new relationships in that data isn't an advancement of capability.
What? Are you arguing that anyone in the world who isn't themselves running empirical research is not advancing any capabilities?
Also, on a related note, there's absolutely nothing stopping AIs from designing, running and analyzing their own experiments. As just one example, I'll mention the impressive OpenDrop microfluidics device [0] and a recent Steve Mould video about it [1] - it allows a computer to precisely control the mixing of liquids in almost arbitrary ways.
[0] https://gaudishop.ch/index.php/product/opendrop-v4-digital-m...
This is even more true for construction workers and cooks. The actually, actually skilled, I suppose.
Also, an AI still can't come close to replacing either interns or juniors—but, I suppose we're just supposed to act like shouldering more work cleaning up after an AI that can't learn rather than hiring someone up to the task is progress.
> This has happened before in other industries. Lots of things that are now automated or no longer exist due to computerisation (e.g. manually processing cheques, fixing many types of bookkeeping errors) were part of the training of juniors and how they gained their first real world experience. There is still a funnel in those careers. A narrower one, but still sufficient.
AI killing the ad industry sounds great and I fully support it.
The only difference between the two is in the delivery of the end product.
"Instead of treated, we get tricked"; as the old broadway show goes.
It's the hard knock life for [some].
But in the context of highly skilled work, I don't think anyone hires juniors or interns to actually do any productive work. You typically hire juniors for the hope of retention of future intermediate talents.
... which requires these individuals to have skills surpassing AI, and as AI is only getting better... in the end, for large corporations the decision between AI or humans will always be price.
I wouldn't hold your breath for accurate numbers, given the way Trump has treated that bureau since they gave a jobs report he didn't like.
Now the automation of that arbitrariness, trained not for specificity, does definitely degrade that leading edge and puts specificity further out of reach - particularly that humans mistake output as valid or specific.
It's an act of insanity made tech-normal.