Authority moves twice in this transition.
The first transfer
Professional bodies hold their standing because their judgment is trusted. Auditors certify, lawyers opine, supervisors supervise, and in each case a person is answerable for a conclusion. When part of that conclusion becomes machine output, the standing itself comes into question: what an audit opinion certifies, what a legal opinion is worth, what a supervisor can actually supervise.
That is the first transfer, from the professional to the system. It happens task by task, and every individual step is defensible. Nobody decides to erode the authority of a profession. It erodes as the side effect of forty reasonable decisions about efficiency, each of which was correct on its own terms.
The second transfer is where the standard actually gets set
What a system produces is governed by its training data, its filters and its prioritization. All three are design decisions, made inside companies and implemented in code that no outside party sees.
A professional who accepts the output is not deferring to "AI." They are deferring to a set of choices made in a firm they will never visit and cannot audit. Authority over what counts as a sound judgment migrates out of the profession and into a vendor's design decisions, and nobody ever votes on it.
Standardization is a risk problem before it is a cultural one
When everyone consults the same systems, language, reasoning patterns and evaluations converge. In professional services that convergence has a name: correlated judgment fails together. A field whose practitioners all reason from the same model has no second opinion left, only a louder first one.
Diversity of judgment is what has made these professions resilient, and a single model running underneath every workflow removes it quietly. Societal values then take shape in part through the systems people work with, alongside open debate and human judgment. To enable discussions and progress, we need to have diversity of thought.
The same mechanism, at the size of one desk
The Midjourney mentality is the individual version, and the term has been on this site since its earliest pages because it keeps holding up. It describes handing the creative step of a problem to the machine at the start, before the problem has been understood, structured or even stated, and then accepting what comes back.
What creates the risk is the moment the tool sets the direction of thinking, ahead of any judgment about what the problem actually is. Work that way and you automate your own mistakes along with the task.
Where this leaves you
Critical distance in working with these systems is an individual competence and a societal necessity at once. The people who define what their field accepts as correct are the same people who decide what the machine converges on. That is why this page and the position page are one argument at two scales.