[Terr_]

Hold up, why it changed matters to parent-poster's argument. Consider the difference between:

1. "The technology's capability was inferior to what humans were creating, therefore the quality of the output dropped."

2. "The costs of employing humans created a floor to the price/quality you could offer and still make a profit. Without the human labor, a lower-quality product became possible to offer."

The first is a question of engineering, the second is a question of economic choice and market-fit.

[fwip]

Some of both.

The fabric and clothes were worse, and cheaper. This put many traditional workers out of business, making actually good clothes scarcer, and eventually, more expensive than they previously were.

[Terr_]

I think the poster's "LLMs are not like textile machines" point hinges on whether a step down in quality is required due to engineering issues or not, at least for an equivalent product. (E.g. bulk cloth, rather than fine embroidery.)

[fwip]

I'm talking about equivalent products. The cloth made by machine during the Industrial Revolution was meaningfully worse in quality than the hand-made stuff.