"AIs can't even try to do my job!"
=> "AIs are so terrible at doing my job!"
=> "Why can't the idiots trying to use AI for my job tell the results they're getting are terrible?"
=> "AI is helping me, but that's it; I'm still doing the work."
=> "I'm doing an irreplaceable part of the work with my skills in prompting the AI!"
=> "Huh, the new generation of AIs is getting pretty good if you just ask it. But the AI still makes some mistakes that only I can correct, and nothing can replace my human taste in knowing what to ask for and curating the results!" The ratio of entry-level applicants in the field to entry-level job openings is now getting very bad.
=> Companies are no longer hiring new experienced people. Applicant to job ratios for senior positions are getting bad. You start to hear about experienced people who are looking for another job and cannot find one. Managers are expecting employees who still have jobs to put out three times the work volume by using AI to assist throughput, even if the humans protest that the AI-assisted output is not as good and they're having to cut corners.
I'm surprised we haven't gotten further than the last stage already on translators or graphic artists. It's clearly happening, but slower than I would have thought, even after I tried to adjust my expectations for how slowly the real economy ever adopts anything.
In coding, the later stages are so recent that tech companies haven't gotten past barely beginning to trying to adjust policies to the second-to-last stage of technology.
But there's another generation of AI. And another. And another. And the companies actually start to adapt to the conditions implied by the AI from three generations earlier.
The process does not continue indefinitely. "AIs that do AI research" start going through those stages and some time after that everyone is dead.