In capitalism everything can and is reduced down to some costing indeed. We don't have public schools and art classes because it's nice, it's because an educated society as a whole has a much higher economic output and you need someone to design good looking products which will sell better. I wouldn't say I agree with the process, but you can't ignore that it's the underlying reason for almost everything our society does.

On topic of LLMs and diffusion models I doubt they're really having that much of a positive social impact, I would bet that in the long run they'll automate more of the jobs humans would like to do compared to the ones we don't, and erode trust on a global level. But the economic gain is undeniable so we're doing it anyway. Automating all work would be a good thing in an ideal world, but in practice it's the one thing that still gives the lower classes some leverage over the capitalists and a world where the average person is expendable and unemployable isn't good for society.