Same as it ever was.
In The Grundrisse, Marx writes: “once adopted into the production process of capital, … labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is … an automatic system of machinery … set in motion by an automaton so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”
The process of history that Marx explains here and elsewhere clarifies that automation (in any form) is not a dehumanizing force in itself.
Dehumanization results from capitalism, and the final form of that dehumanization is automation. Capitalism's first step is always to treat the workers as machines until they can invent machines to do it even more mechanically.
Across history and across industries, we eventually get a system where workers no longer use tools to do work, but vast new systems of machines use workers as their appendages.
(This is true whether we're talking humans relegating to being servants of an assembly line, artists getting crushed under the wheels of an industrial art-making system like Hollywood, or AI companies stealing your images as fodder for computerized image generation.)
David Harvey puts it this way: “Instead of technology leading the transition from feudalism into capitalism, the technology is the final moment where capital actually comes to be itself.”
