> As an early adopter of digital cameras and convert to film photography,

I suppose this is a very good example.

Analog photography killed the market for portraits and landscapes, making them available to commoners - first by letting professional photographers make them much cheaper and faster than artists, and eventually by cameras getting cheap enough even commoners could afford them.

Yes, this hurt artists a lot. Turns out, the people wanting portraits never actually cared about the process, just the outcome, and from their point of view, analog photographs were not only cheaper but also better quality than portraits and sketches made by artists.

But I want to focus on something else entirely - on what analog photography gave us. It wasn't just portraits for everyone. It gave even the poor the ability to hold on to few of most cherished memories in physical form - think e.g. large family gatherings, weddings, graduations, etc. would have someone with a camera there, making photos. Think of your grandparents' photos of their parents, all in sepia or black and white. There were no earlier version of that available to the everyman.

Analog photography also gave us photographic evidence, boosted importance of journalism. On the art side, it gave us cinematography and everything attached to it. It created cinemas, and then it created TVs. But there's one more thing.

Analog photography gave us a good half of scientific and engineering progress in the late 19th and most of the 20th century. I'd dare to say it directly gave us nuclear physics and quantum physics, because it allowed to observe things we previously couldn't see, or wouldn't notice if we could. E.g. many people probably saw flashes in their eyes as some high-energy particle briefly oversaturated a rod cell. But those same particles leaving permanent traces on a photographic film, for us to see and study at our leisure? That's another game.

Now, digital photography. Digital photography killed the market for all the auxiliary services around analog photography. It hurt the still fresh art named "photography", and all but killed the dark room. But it gave us something as important as the previous step - it turned photography from expensive craft to basic human activity. Today, it's completely normal to casually take pictures of bills, papers, posters; it's normal to snap a label at the back of some device, because you'll need to type that number somewhere else in 2 minutes and you don't want to force yourself to memorize it.

Science and engineering-wise, digital photography gave us a lot, too, if perhaps less obvious. Most of it is pedestrian. So many daily practices, so many production process, involve digital cameras somewhere in the pipeline, in ways that weren't possible with analog cameras.

I could go on.

Point is, what the new tool does to artists is usually separate them from their source of income. Artists obviously want to have the two intertwined, but then again, can they talk about heart of the craft when taking commission for it? It's a complex topic. But either way, the new doesn't just mess up with the old, in many cases it's transformative well beyond anyone's imagination. True progress.

Will generative AI turn out to be like analog and digital photography in this regard? I don't know. I'm mildly convinced it will.