> 1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers.
Counterpoint: AI's displacement of culture workers is to this point negligible. Nobody is consuming AI-generated media, except maybe in the trashiest tier of tiktok scrolling. Culture workers feel screwed, but they have not in fact been screwed.
The "artists and other culture workers" are now the rest of the population, making what they want without needing to passively consume the legacy media.