When the camera was invented, no one was claiming a photo was a painting.

The camera replaced painters for the "I want to capture a static image" market but not the "I want art as expressed by a painter" market. While tragic for a lot of painters at the time, it does seem like the cost of progress.

In writing, there is no "objective capture" like with cameras; there's no tech that can take a picture of your conscious thoughts and translate that to words on a page in a way that's reproducible. So there is only a single arena of "written expression" that LLMs and traditional writers are competing in. And while there is a strong desired market for "art as expressed by the [human] writer," the product itself is much more difficult to distinguish from the new tech (LLM writing) than a photo from a painting. And the low effort of entry into this desired market with LLM writing is driving its dilution.

The analogy would work if instead they invented a magical camera that could turn any scene into a painting in any art style reliably, and hide the painting's origins.