> In almost all cases the total amount of creation increases because the technology lowered costs

But this doesn't lower the cost of learning and writing CSS, it just scoops up some of it and offers that cheaply, and even that only because it's offered below cost. If anything I'd say it increases the cost, because now you don't get paid to get and be good at what an LLM is supposedly good enough at, and have less free time to do it anyway. You may not even have a computer because your current one broke and you can't afford a new one.

It will happen and it already started to happen. It started to happen even before LLM, when google started to hide smaller personal blogs in its search result. Expectation of the monetary reward has nothing to do with it, discoverability does. Culture of creating content does not exist when people cant see what others created and know no one will see what they created. A lot of smaller open source was monkey see monkey do thing - we have seen other open source projects and wanted something like that. Likewise with tutorials, we have seen other people write cool tutorials and felt like creating own and showing it out.

That is not the dynamic with LLM. You see LLM output, but original creator is hidden. And if you write your own, no one will find it. Worst, other people will tell you "LLM could have write it" in reaction ... so people wont bother.

> search engines copied and indexed web pages

Notably, search engines sent people toward web pages. And when search engines stopped doing that and started to copy content, those original pages started to die out.

> Printing presses copied manuscripts

Printing press made dissemination easier. It is an equivalent of early internet, not of LLM.

> open-source software was incorporated into commercial products

Commercial product using open source library had different user then the library it is using. And crucially, it is not hiding that library from the library user.

> Wikipedia repackaged knowledge produced elsewhere

Yes, and we collectively create less encyclopedias. They are not worth writing and checking for correctness anymore, so we don't do that all that much anymore.