Will creatives survive AI?

What to know (and how a smelly kid is relevant)

Daniel Faro. Caldo project. Death to Stock

Read time: 36 minutes

This review distills February 2023 - March 2026 media coverage of how AI has been and will be affecting your paycheck, workplace expectations, and career trajectory.

It’s long and will get clipped in your inbox. Click the link up top to read comfortably in your browser.

If you want to hear my research process (and how much of this was AI-written), that’s wise. Please read this footnote.¹

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Since everything with AI feels fucking insane, I dusted off my Ph.D. dropout skills and wrote us a fat book report.

I don’t need to tell you how to read. Except you’re probably stressed out and time-poor. So:

You can scroll all the way down to What’s happening in my field? (e.g. creative direction, design, film, copywriting, architecture, music).

For what you need to know to act, read these sections:

• What’s the big picture?

• What’s the takeaway?

• Shit, what do I do?

Alternatively, you can lilypad-hop through it by reading all bolded parts. It will give you a more detailed picture.

A stress-tested, AI-informed career strategy should be one of your top priorities.

Many of you are on it. But for those that aren’t, I won’t mince words: get on it. As you’ll see in a second, the reportage is staggering.

The AI era is urgently, historically significant to creatives. The impact is akin to what the invention of photography (initially) did to painting. Only turn it way up.

Second only to climate, AI is the most consequential topic of our lifetimes.

“You’re staring at the sun / You’re standing in the sea / Your mouth is open wide / You’re trying hard to breathe / The water’s at your neck / There’s lightning in your teeth / Your body’s over me”²

Just as TV on the Radio told us in the early aughts, in this article we’ll be staring at the sun.

After fixing my gaze on it all, two things happened:

1. I now know it’s even worse than I’d imagined.

2. I feel more empowered than ever to respond.

Of course, there’s no denying the usefulness of AI. It helped me write this monster. I kept squinting and muttering, “omg I love you” due to the sheer amount of time it saved me, while doing something important for my people.

On the dark side, its economic impact on creatives packs a gut-punch in some cases. And OpenAI, Anthropic, and others will keep releasing new features at a quick clip.

Sadly, it is the unprepared and under-informed who will keep getting caught mouth open wide, trying hard to breathe, the water at their necks… gulping and sputtering as the riptides crash on.

“If you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready.”
— the late Grammy-nominated rapper Nipsey Hussle

So off with your sunglasses, let’s stare straight at the thing.

🗺️ What’s the big picture?

Interestingly, a Yale Budget Lab study found that AI “has not yet significantly [emphasis mine] impacted the overall job market” at the macro level [emphasis mine].

The creative sector is an exception — displacement is direct and documented for us, particularly for freelancers and entry-level roles.

In design, one structural pattern underlies them all: companies are contracting team sizes rather than doing mass firings. When someone leaves, the role isn’t backfilled — managers assume AI can cover it.

Harvard Business Review (January 2026) reported that the job losses and slowed hiring are happening — even though companies are still waiting for generative AI to fully deliver on its promises.

Worker Sentiment and Public Opinion

Pew Research Center surveys from 2025 found that 52% of U.S. workers feel worried about the future impact of AI in the workplace, while only 6% say it will lead to more opportunities for them.

Across the general public, 64% expect AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, while only 5% expect more jobs.

AI experts are significantly more optimistic, with 73% seeing AI as having a positive impact on how people do their jobs. While only 23% of the general public shares that view.

AI Restructures Creative Work Faster Than Predicted

The consulting firm CVL Economics projected in 2024 that AI would disrupt over 200,000 jobs in the U.S. entertainment sector alone by 2026.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI was cited in the announcements of more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025 across industries.

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report projects 9 million jobs to be “displaced” by AI over the next five years — though it also forecasts ~11 million new roles created.

In the UK: By early 2026, the Brave New World? report — drawing on evidence from over 10,000 UK creators across illustration, writing, music, photography, and performance — found:

• One in three creative jobs already lost to GenAI

• 32% of illustrators reported lost commissions or cancelled projects

• 86% of authors said GenAI had already reduced earnings

• 72% of authors said job opportunities had been cut

• 57% of authors said their career was no longer sustainable

• 99% of creators said their work had been scraped without consent

🎣 What’s the takeaway?

“I feel it all, I feel it all / The wings are wide, the wings are wide / Wild card in sight, wild card in sight / Ooh I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart / I’ll be the one to hold the gun / I know more than I knew before.”³

“Miss Kat, Miss Kat!” he grabbed then yelled into my thigh.

“Okay, okay, I’ll let you play with the iPad but we have to clean you up first,” I insisted, trying to keep my balance.

Ravin was a second grader in my after-school class I taught years ago. His round face had stormclouds, with some sweet rays of sunshine. He was smaller than the other boys. They didn’t include him in their soccer games.

Mostly because he smelled really bad. A whiff of his hair and charcoal gray hoodie would make me gag and I had to turn away so he couldn’t see. Ravin lived in a van with his grandparents, who were in their 40s. They looked 60. The whole family reeked. When you live in a van, you can’t shower when you want.

Hating it, but with half the fight he used to give me, Ravin let me give his torso and legs a paper towel bath. Even though we were in the faculty bathroom, shame, gratitude, and fury took turns flashing across his face, like lasers at an EDM show. But he knew when he was clean, they bullied him less.

Ravin wasn’t the only one I lost sleep over. There was Jordaya, who got abused at home and had raging ADHD. Chelsea, hopelessly behind and painfully shy, had alcoholic parents who always picked her up late. Tomas, whose parents worked three jobs each, so they didn’t notice when he outgrew his shoes or needed a haircut or lost his entire backpack.

Every day I fought the urge to buy them what they lacked. The stress and heartbreak was a growing helium balloon, living amongst my insides.

The wisdom traditions say there’s a way to let your emotions rise up, feel it all, and then channel them into being a better teacher, being an excellent creative, anything.

Not for lack of trying, I couldn’t figure it out. I felt it all. It all but knocked me down. But there is a way.

Most of the takeaways below show how employers are hoping that AI can replace some or many creative workers.

How might you approach this?

Feel it all, make a plan, then stress-test it.

Don’t bypass and erode what you do have over AI: humanity, emotions, empathy, insight, etc. It’s about time we realized our feelings aren’t a problem, they’re a signal. Yes, feel it all so you can then come up with something good:

A Deeper Structural Shift

Beyond raw job numbers, researchers and creators point to a qualitative degradation of creative work.

Brookings scholars noted that in Hollywood, the fear is not just job loss but transformation of remaining roles — writers becoming editors of AI-generated drafts rather than original creators, in what one writer called “the Uber-fication of Hollywood”.

A UOC research study estimated that generative AI could automate up to 26% of tasks in arts, design, entertainment, media, and sports, predicting that “less time will be spent on technical execution, and more time on strategic thinking and conception”.

UNCTAD contributor and University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao argued,

If generative AI destroys human creative industries by displacing jobs and discouraging aspiring artists, “we are heading towards a future where art and music styles are fixed and static, and we are doomed to listen and see the same styles forever.”

AI-Driven Layoffs

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that 54,883 U.S. layoffs in 2025 were explicitly driven by AI, part of a total 1.2 million job cuts that year — the highest since the pandemic.

Major companies that cited AI when cutting headcount: Accenture cut ~11,000 roles citing AI automation potential, Salesforce eliminated ~4,000 customer service positions, and Duolingo reduced contractor reliance for tasks AI can complete.

The pattern extends beyond tech. The broader entertainment sector is experiencing what The Ankler called “Hollywood’s AI-Era Jobs Collapse” — radiating outward from studios into marketing firms, PR shops, freelance editors, and the entire supplier ecosystem.

“AI-Washing” vs. Real Displacement

A nuanced but important distinction: not all AI-cited layoffs are straightforwardly caused by AI. A February 2026 New York Times investigation noted the phenomenon of “AI-washing” — companies using AI as cover for layoffs that are also driven by over-hiring corrections, VC tightening, and restructuring.

Freelance Market Collapse

Freelancers have been hit earliest and hardest. A study by Imperial College London and DIW Berlin analyzing over 3 million freelance job posts found a 21% decrease in weekly postings for automation-prone jobs after ChatGPT’s release. Writing-related jobs experienced the steepest decline at 30%, followed by software/web development (20%) and graphic design/3D modeling (17%). A separate study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior found that freelance jobs easily handled by AI — like “About Us” pages and real estate copy — dropped by over 50%.

Brookings Institution research confirmed these trends at a broader scale: freelancers in AI-vulnerable occupations experienced a 2% decline in contracts and a 5% drop in earnings following new AI software releases in 2022.

Job Market Contraction

The data on creative job loss is stark and accelerating. Some examples:

• In a landmark study by CVL Economics, three-quarters of those surveyed said GenAI had already supported the elimination, reduction, or consolidation of jobs in their division.

• The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report flagged graphic design as the 11th fastest-declining job — a dramatic reversal from two years earlier, when it was classified as a “moderately growing” occupation.

• Meanwhile, Hollywood writers saw their available gigs fall 42% from 2023 to 2024.

Workplace Expectations & Upskilling Pressure

The expectation to be AI-fluent has accelerated dramatically. Key skills now demanded include prompt engineering, AI-powered design tools, automation workflows, and AI ethics literacy.

Key data points:

• 36% of employees say AI expertise is now essential for their role — up from 23% in 2024 — and 38% of employers agree, a 10-point year-over-year jump

• 73% of workers say creative and visual skills are expected at work or school, with 84% noting these expectations have risen in the last three years, per an Adobe survey

• Only 49% of employees feel fully equipped for their roles (down from 59% in 2024); Gen Z confidence dropped a stunning 20 points to just 39%

• A training gap is real: only 44% of employers claim to offer formal AI upskilling programs, but only 33% of employees confirm having access to AI upskilling training

• PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey found that among daily AI users, 75% felt they had the learning resources they needed — versus just 59% of infrequent users, showing that AI access is widening skill inequality.

Entry-Level Creative Jobs: A Pipeline Crisis

Perhaps the most underreported story is what AI is doing to career pipelines. AI tends to eliminate the “grunt work” — production tasks, first drafts, iterative design — that has historically been how junior creatives develop skills and build toward senior roles. The Atlantic flagged this in a December 2025 piece: when AI does the grunt work, it removes the training ground that turns assistants into directors, junior designers into art directors, and staff writers into editors.

The people hit hardest, almost universally, are junior and entry-level workers — the pipeline that feeds every creative field. This threatens not just jobs today, but the bench of experienced creative leaders of tomorrow.

🫣 Shit. What do I do?

Stay tuned.

I’m working on deep-dive, actionable essays. There’s a lot of upside to this as well.

Try to keep up.

I know it’s not easy, AI is in many ways a fast, Hulk-like mutant. Who is likely to come out okay? Here’s my bet:

Highly skilled, experienced creatives who love their craft to the point of obsession; share a clear, distinct point of view; are cultivating a personal brand that pops.

They know enough AI to be dangerous; are actively stress-testing their AI-informed, clear career strategy.

Practice all that, rinse and repeat. You’ll be better off than most.

Overhaul your portfolio.

The single most important shift: portfolios now must demonstrate AI fluency and strategic judgment, not just visual craft. A Verified Insider analysis of the 2025–2026 design hiring market — written with input from former Apple design leadership — found that companies now want to see how candidates use AI to prototype, validate ideas, speed up exploration, and analyze data. The advice is explicit: include at least one case study in your portfolio that incorporates AI as part of the design process.

But showing AI tools isn’t the point — showing thinking is.

As one senior design hiring lead put it: “AI handles the execution. What companies want to see is taste, craft, decision-making, systems thinking, first principles, and technical depth”.

The distinction matters: don’t just list Midjourney or Figma AI under “tools.” Show the judgment behind what was kept, what was thrown away, and why.

Know what to put in your portfolio.

Individual contributors should lead with 3–5 focused, high-impact case studies. Start each one with a concrete business result before the process walk-through. Make it interactive — add Figma links, Loom walkthroughs, clickable prototypes.

Design leaders should spotlight team achievements, strategic influence, mentorship, and how they shaped direction across product and business. Metrics, testimonials, and specific examples of managing change reinforce the leadership story.

Everyone should tailor the portfolio per company. The era of one generic portfolio link has been over for a while now — 71% of employers say portfolio quality strongly influences their final decision.

Get AI fluent. Learn to sell yourself.

The framing that’s working for candidates now is not “I use AI tools” but “Here’s how AI changed my process and allowed me to deliver higher-impact work.” A practical example: “I used AI to generate 40 layout variations in 10 minutes, which let me spend the time I saved going deeper into user research and strategic trade-offs — and here’s the outcome”.

Be prepared to discuss (designers especially):

• What you chose not to automate and why (this signals judgment)

• Where AI failed and how you corrected it (signals critical thinking)

• How AI changed your time allocation — less production, more strategic problem-solving

• AI ethics considerations you have navigated — especially relevant for branding and UX roles dealing with user trust

Update your resume with AI skills.

For clients updating résumés, AI skills should appear in three places: skills section (tools like Figma AI, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, Cursor, RunwayML), experience bullets (show quantified impact — “reduced prototyping time by 40% using AI-assisted workflows”), and professional development (courses or certifications in prompt engineering or AI design)

📍What’s happening in my field?

Mar Boerr. Eccentric Nature project. Death to Stock.

Design

UI/UX and Product Design (Digital)

This is probably the most data-rich story of any design field. The numbers are severe:

• UX designer job postings dropped 71% from their 2022 peak; UX researcher postings fell 73%

• In 2023 alone, UX job postings dropped to roughly 70% of their 2021 levels, per Indeed data cited by Nielsen Norman Group

• The 2024 UXPA salary survey of 408 UX professionals showed 35% of organizations added staff, 35% lost staff — net growth of zero, the worst since 2009

• A 2025 User Interviews survey found 49% of UX professionals feel negative about the field’s future (up 26 percentage points from 2024), and 67% feel negative about career opportunities

• 21% reported their companies laid off UX staff in 2025

• Only 4.2% of open roles target junior or entry-level designers across five countries studied — reports of 1,000+ applications for single entry-level positions are common

Nielsen Norman Group’s landmark “UX Reckoning” piece describes the field as being on a “corporate chopping block,” with business leaders still treating research and design as “nice-to-have” — and AI giving them cover to cut. NNG’s blunt prescription: designers who survive will be those with critical thinking, taste, and the ability to connect UX outcomes to business goals — not those who rely on templates and toolkits.

That said, the WEF Future of Jobs 2025 report offers a counterpoint:

While graphic design is classified as the 11th fastest-declining job, UI and UX design are projected to grow — because someone has to design AI-native interfaces. The split is between execution-heavy roles (declining) and strategically-oriented ones (growing).

Workplace expectations: AI fluency is now table stakes. Figma AI, Adobe Firefly, and AI-assisted research synthesis tools like Dovetail are expected skills.

The framing shift in job listings is from “designer who uses AI” to “AI-native product designer” — someone who can work across PM, engineering, and data simultaneously.

Graphic Design and Branding

Graphic design is in the most acute contraction of any design field. The WEF flagged it as the 11th fastest-declining job globally — a category that two years prior was considered moderately growing. The mechanism is blunt: AI image generators trained on unlicensed work can produce “good enough” brand assets at a fraction of the cost of hiring a human.

Freelancers bore the first wave. The Imperial College/DIW Berlin study found graphic design and 3D modeling freelance postings down 17% following ChatGPT’s release, part of a broader 21% drop in automation-exposed freelance work.

Execution-level work — social media templates, basic ad layouts, product mockups — has been largely automated away at the client level.

What’s surviving: Brand strategy, visual identity systems requiring cultural and psychological depth, and art direction that requires judgment.

The Artlist AI Trend Report (2026) positions the “AI creative director” as the single most sought-after role in advertising — someone who orchestrates AI outputs rather than produces individual assets. The job is shifting from maker to curator and director of AI-generated material.

For branding specifically: McKinsey and senior agency leaders describe the retained human value as the stuff AI can’t replicate — brand voice, cultural sensitivity, the ability to read a client relationship, and the strategic decision of what not to make.

Creative Direction, Art Direction, and Design Leadership

These roles are not disappearing — they are expanding in scope while shrinking in headcount.

Fortune (December 2025) reported that companies like Accenture, Salesforce, and Autodesk describe creative workers becoming “directors” who delegate to AI agents rather than executing work themselves. One senior Accenture executive described this as requiring companies to restructure their corporate hierarchy entirely.

MorganHR’s workforce evolution research describes today’s Art Director as a “cross-functional creative strategist” — expected to guide omnichannel brand storytelling, collaborate across UX/marketing/data teams, and use consumer insights to shape campaigns. By 2028–2030, the projection is Art Directors orchestrating AI-human creative systems and leading experience design rooted in behavioral science.

The dark side: 20 artists today may become 1 AI “director” tomorrow — productivity gains are being extracted as headcount reductions, not shared as efficiency dividends.

The ladder from junior designer to art director to creative director is breaking, because the entry-level execution roles that trained junior talent are being eliminated first.

The “Producer to Director” Shift

This is the defining metaphor of the moment. At Fortune’s 2025 Brainstorm AI conference, Salesforce VP Nancy Xu described it: workers are moving “from producers to more directors.”

The question shifts from “How do I accomplish this goal?” to “What goals do I want to accomplish, and how do I delegate to AI?”. Autodesk’s chief customer officer added: “With AI, the floor has been raised, but so has the ceiling”.

For creative directors specifically, the role is becoming orchestration of AI-human creative systems. MorganHR’s workforce evolution research maps out a 5-year trajectory:

• 2025–now: Creative strategy, branding, team leadership, proficiency in Adobe Suite, Figma, motion tools

• 2026–2027: Fluency in prompting AI tools like Adobe Firefly, data interpretation from analytics platforms, collaboration with ML engineers and UX researchers

• 2028–2029: Experience design rooted in behavioral science, immersive storytelling (VR/AR/spatial), emotion-led campaign development

• 2030: Orchestrating AI-human creative systems, brand innovation strategy, performance-based design leadership

Agency Restructuring Is Real and Accelerating

The most visible structural signal: WPP, the world’s largest advertising group, announced in February 2026 that it’s bringing Ogilvy, VML, AKQA, Grey, Burson, and Landor under a single “WPP Creative” umbrella — explicitly to eliminate structural friction and optimize its AI resources. This isn’t a cosmetic rebrand. Reuters reported it as part of a plan to save £500 million, driven by AI disruption reshaping traditional agency business models.

A Sunup study of 225 senior U.S. marketing and advertising leaders found:

• 100% of agencies surveyed already use AI, with nearly 60% saying it’s deeply embedded

• AI is performing at the level of mid-career professionals across copywriting, design, research, and project management

• Nearly half have already reduced or paused entry-level recruitment

• Over half of large and mid-sized firms expect significant headcount cuts within three years

• Traditional job titles are being replaced by hybrids: creative technologists, AI innovation leads, and brand technologists

• The “prompt engineer” title is already fading — firms now value intelligent use of AI over knowing how to talk to it

The bottom line for creative leaders: agencies are repositioning around consultation, strategy, and governance, not production volume. Success is measured by how seamlessly human expertise and machine precision interact, not by team size.

What Creative Leaders Must Do Differently

McKinsey’s January 2026 research on “Building Leaders in the Age of AI” describes the core shift as moving from “command” to “context.” Leaders won’t always be the smartest in the room — AI may outperform them on execution. Their job becomes creating the context in which teams navigate AI-informed process changes, role changes, and disruptions.

Concretely, creative leadership in the AI era requires:

• Training teams in prompt engineering and AI tool workflows while establishing creative quality standards for AI output

• Developing governance systems — ensuring every AI-generated asset reinforces brand positioning rather than diluting it

• Managing the psychological challenges of role transformation — positioning AI as creative amplification, not replacement

• Building hybrid workflows that combine human creativity with AI speed

• Maintaining accountability for direction, tone, and ethics — machines handle repetition, humans carry responsibility

• Cross-functional fluency: bridging UX, marketing, data, and engineering rather than operating in a design silo

Reworked’s analysis of management in 2026 makes the point sharply: what matters isn’t knowing how AI technology works, but “fostering curiosity, encouraging people to ask better questions, and supporting teams in making sense of new tools”.

The Broken Ladder Problem for Leaders to Solve

Accenture’s Ami Palan warned at the Fortune conference that if AI agents handle entry-level execution work, “companies may need to hire fewer people, and some learning opportunities may disappear for younger workers”. The traditional path from junior designer → mid-level → senior → art director → creative director depended on junior execution work that AI is now absorbing.

For leaders who care about the future of their teams and the profession, this means deliberately creating alternative learning pathways — shadowing, mentorship structures, stretch assignments on strategic work — that don’t depend on production tasks as the training mechanism.

Salary and Compensation Trends

PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer — based on nearly a billion job ads from six continents — found that workers with AI skills command a 56% wage premium over similar roles without AI skills, double the 25% premium from the prior year. This is the single most important compensation data point for your clients.

Lightcast’s analysis of 1.3 billion job postings echoes this: postings that include AI skills offer 28% higher salaries — nearly $18,000 more per year — than those without. And AI-requiring roles continue to grow at 7.5% even as overall job postings fell 11.3%.

Negotiation Leverage for AI-Fluent Designers

The Verified Insider’s design hiring playbook advises designers to negotiate like founders: think beyond base salary to stock options, learning budgets (critical for staying current on AI tools), remote/hybrid setup, and growth paths. Many hiring managers are willing to pay more for candidates with AI-assisted workflow experience or design leadership in complex domains — this gives AI-fluent designers genuine negotiation leverage.

The PwC data also shows that employer demand for formal degrees is declining, especially for AI-exposed roles — falling 7–9 percentage points from 2019 to 2024. This means skills-based demonstrations (portfolio, case studies, AI project examples) are gaining ground over credentials.

The Bifurcation

Compensation is bifurcating dramatically.

Designers who are AI-native, strategic, and cross-functional are commanding more than ever.

Designers who are execution-only are facing a market where the floor of what AI can do keeps rising, compressing their value.

The Salesforce VP’s framing captures it: “The near-term impact of AI will largely be that we’re going to take the bottom 50 percentile performers and bring them into the top 50 percentile. If you’re in the top 10 percentile, the impact of AI is actually much less”.

For creative leaders, the question isn’t just “How do I use AI?” It’s “How do I become the person whose judgment, taste, and strategic thinking directs what AI produces?” That’s where the premium — in both salary and career durability — lives now.

Fashion Design

Fashion also presents a bifurcated picture. McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 describes AI shifting from “competitive edge to business necessity,” with companies reshaping workforces so that existing roles become more AI-centric and shift toward higher-value creative and analytical tasks. McKinsey’s earlier generative AI in fashion report estimated the technology could add $150–$275 billion to fashion and luxury operating profits within three to five years.

But the workforce impact is already visible. The industry recorded 18,517+ job losses in 2025 amid broader structural distress, with 80% of fashion executives surveyed expecting no improvement. One fringe but frequently cited projection claims AI will eliminate 70% of fashion design jobs by 2028, particularly in pattern-making, trend forecasting, and technical specification — tasks that AI tools can now complete in minutes instead of hours.

The roles most at risk are technical and production-facing: pattern graders, junior trend analysts, lookbook and catalog photographers, and entry-level visual merchandisers. Creative directors and senior designers who set cultural direction and manage client and retail relationships are better insulated — for now.

Workplace expectations: AI trend-forecasting tools (analyzing millions of social media images daily), generative design tools for rapid ideation, and AI-driven demand prediction are increasingly standard at major houses and fast-fashion brands alike.

Web Design

Web design’s execution layer has been heavily disrupted. Tools like Wix ADI, Framer AI, and Webflow’s AI features have commoditized template-based site creation. Freelance web design and development postings fell roughly 20% in the Imperial College study, and basic web design work (small business sites, landing pages, portfolio builds) has been among the hardest-hit categories on platforms like Upwork.

What remains in demand: conversion-focused design with strong UX reasoning, complex design systems, accessibility-compliant builds, and senior-level work that bridges design and engineering. Web design as a standalone profession is consolidating into UI/UX and product design roles — or disappearing into AI-assisted no-code tools for clients who would never have hired a human designer anyway.

Industrial Design and Product Design (Physical)

Industrial and physical product design has been less immediately disrupted than screen-based disciplines, largely because physical constraints, manufacturing tolerances, and supply chain realities require domain expertise that AI can’t yet replicate end-to-end. AI tools like Autodesk’s generative design software accelerate iteration dramatically — producing hundreds of structural variants in minutes — but a human designer still selects, refines, and stress-tests them.

Autodesk’s 2025 AI Jobs Report found that AI fluency mentions in US job listings surged 56.1% in 2025 (building on 114.8% growth in 2023 and 120.6% in 2024) across design-and-make industries including product design and manufacturing. The message is clear: AI tools are required, not optional. But the report also found that design skills have surpassed coding and cloud skills as the most in-demand competency in AI-specific job listings — human-centered thinking is more valued, not less, in AI-native design roles.

The junior pipeline problem exists here too. Firms are hiring fewer entry-level product designers, preferring experienced talent who can direct AI tools autonomously.

Interior Design

Interior design is among the most insulated of the design fields in this analysis, for a specific reason: the work is fundamentally relational.

The core value proposition — translating a client’s lifestyle, emotional preferences, and spatial behavior into built environments — requires human judgment and relationship that AI can augment but not replicate.

AI tools (space planning software, material visualization, AR walkthroughs) are accelerating the early-phase workflow dramatically, collapsing weeks of initial concepting into hours.

But the profession is evolving: 62% of UK architects (a closely adjacent field) are already using AI tools, with 84% describing AI as augmenting rather than replacing their work.

The disruption risk is concentrated in commoditized residential work — the kind of one-room, budget-constrained projects that AI-powered tools like Modsy or Houzz now handle directly, bypassing human designers entirely. High-end residential, commercial, and hospitality design remain substantially human-dependent.

Experiential Design

Experiential and spatial design (retail environments, branded activations, events, installations) sits at the intersection of architecture, theater, and brand strategy — and is evolving rather than contracting.

AI is being used for rapid prototyping, 3D environment visualization, and interactive tech integration. But the high-touch, site-specific, and relational nature of experiential work makes it harder to automate than screen-based disciplines.

The field is also growing in some dimensions: as AI makes digital content cheaper, brands are investing more in physical, embodied experiences that can’t be replicated online. That said, the production and execution roles within experiential — model-makers, junior spatial designers, set dressers — are being cut in favor of leaner teams using AI visualization tools.

Nick Fancher. Misc project. Death to Stock.

Visual Art and Illustration

This may be the hardest-hit creative sector right now. Because generative AI tools (Midjourney, DALL-E, Adobe Firefly) were trained on artists’ work without consent, they can now produce client-ready visuals at a fraction of what a human artist, illustrator, or designer charges.

Goldman Sachs estimates that AI can automate 26% of the tasks performed by professional artists and designers — including background removal, recoloring, icon generation, and style templating. Visual artists, illustrators, and graphic designers report losing clients and having wages pushed down as employers substitute AI for human work.

Creator-focused surveys paint an even grimmer picture. A 2024 UK Society of Authors survey of nearly 800 respondents found that 26% of illustrators had already lost work directly due to generative AI. Over a third of illustrators (37%) reported decreased income.

Jelly Luise. Live Now project. Death to Stock.

Film, TV, Animation & Gaming

A January 2024 report (CVL Economics, widely cited inThe Atlantic and industry press) found that 203,800 entertainment payroll jobs are affected by AI — and since that figure excludes freelancers and gig workers, the real number is almost certainly higher.

80% of firms that have primarily gig workers are early AI adopters. Entertainment executives themselves are candid about displacement plans: roughly one-third predict job losses for sound editors and 3D modelers within three years, and ~55% expect sound designers to face the greatest displacement. The September 2025 unveiling of “Tilly Norwood,” a realistic AI-generated actress, sparked fresh alarm in Hollywood.

Daniel Faro. Raw Element project. Death to Stock.

Music

The music industry faces layoffs at labels and publishing companies partly driven by AI music generation. Roughly 33% of entertainment business leaders surveyed expect songwriters, composers, and studio engineers to face displacement in the near term, and about 40% put music editors and audio technicians in the vulnerable category.

Global: UNESCO’s 2026 Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report, based on data from 120+ countries, projects that music creators could lose up to 24% of their revenue by 2028, while audiovisual creators could lose 21%. A CISAC-commissioned global economic study calculated the cumulative loss at €22 billion over five years (€10 billion in music, €12 billion in audiovisual), representing a direct transfer of economic value from human creators to AI companies

AI-generated music is projected to be roughly 20% of traditional streaming platform revenues by 2028, and approximately 60% of music library revenues — areas that directly cannibalize human composers’ income. A PRS survey found 74% of its members were concerned about AI-generated music competing with human-made compositions.

In a particularly low moment, the CEO of an AI music generation company claimed publicly in early 2025 that “most musicians don’t genuinely enjoy creating music” and predicted musicians would soon become unnecessary.

What a raging douche.

Tino Renato. Remote Studio project. Death to Stock.

Writing, Editing, Translation, Journalism & Publishing

This is where the data is most brutal and most personal.

Writing — across almost every subfield — has been hit faster and harder than nearly any other creative profession, because text was the first thing generative AI could produce at scale.

Here’s the field-by-field breakdown.

Copywriting

Copywriting has been ground zero for AI displacement. Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine investigation (December 2025) collected firsthand accounts from copywriters across the industry, and the pattern is consistent: companies mandated AI adoption, then eliminated the writers.

The stories are devastating. One agency owner saw revenue collapse from $600,000 per year with 8 employees to less than $10,000 in 2025 — a near-total wipeout driven by small business clients switching to ChatGPT.

A corporate content writer was “forced to use AI until the day I was laid off”. A medical writer’s hours were cut from near full-time to 4–5 hours per month as firms shifted to AI-generated content edited by advanced-degree holders at lower rates.

Bloomberry’s analysis of 180 million global job postings (2023–2025) found that writer job postings fell 27.9% in 2025 versus the prior year — far steeper than the 8% baseline decline across all jobs. The Imperial College/DIW Berlin study found writing-related freelance postings dropped 30% post-ChatGPT — the steepest decline of any category they measured.

The recurring theme: work hasn’t vanished entirely but has been degraded.

Clients now ask writers to edit AI-generated drafts at steep discounts. As one copywriter put it: “I don’t go through the full creative process. I don’t do the hard work that makes me feel alive afterwards. It’s different, more clinical, and much less rewarding”.

Screenwriting

Hollywood screenwriting is contracting sharply — and it’s not just the 2023 strikes. The WGA West’s 2024 annual financial report revealed:

• Total WGA members reporting income decreased 9.4% from 2023 and 24.3% from 2022

• Total member earnings reached $1.5 billion — up 12.7% from the strike-depressed 2023, but still 21% below 2022’s $1.9 billion

• Employment in TV and digital platforms fell 28.5% from 2022

• TV writing jobs specifically fell 42% in the 2023–24 season, with 1,319 fewer positions across all levels

• Writers in news, promotion, and interactive programming saw a 26% reduction in work

The job losses cut across all seniority levels: co-executive producers and above lost 642 positions (40% drop), mid-level roles lost 299 (42%), and staff writers/story editors lost 378 (46%). Screenwriter earnings fell 6% for the first three quarters of 2024, with the number of active screenwriters declining 15% compared to the same period in 2022.

Brookings scholars warned that the deeper danger is the transformation of remaining roles — writers becoming editors of AI-generated drafts rather than original creators, in what was described as “the Uber-fication of Hollywood”.

Book Authors: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Creative Non-Fiction

Fiction Writers

A Cambridge University study (November 2025) of 258 published UK novelists and 74 industry insiders produced alarming findings:

• 51% of novelists believe AI is likely to entirely replace their work

• 39% say their income has already been hit by generative AI

• 85% expect future income to be driven down by AI

• 59% know their work has been used to train AI models without permission or payment

• Genre authors are considered most vulnerable: 66% of respondents listed romance as “extremely threatened,” followed by thrillers (61%) and crime (60%)

• Some novelists reported finding books published under their name on Amazon that they didn’t write

The fear isn’t just direct displacement — it’s indirect. As Cambridge’s Dr. Collett noted: “Most authors do not earn enough from novels alone and rely on income streams such as freelance copywriting or translation which are rapidly drying up due to generative AI”.

Some literary creatives envision a dystopic two-tier market: human-written novels become “luxury items” while AI-generated fiction is cheap or free.

Non-Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction Writers

The ASJA’s “AI and the Writing Profession” survey — the first large-scale report of its kind, covering 1,481 working writers — found:

• 40% of freelancers said AI had reduced their income

• Three out of four freelancers expect writing opportunities to decline in the future

• One in four writers has considered quitting because of AI

• 61% of all writers now use AI tools

• Writers who use AI intensively report $47,000 higher average incomes than those who don’t — but this likely reflects a survivorship effect where only the most established can leverage AI profitably

• 91% are concerned about AI-generated hallucinations contaminating their fields

The UK Society of Authors’ 2024 survey reinforced these findings: 57% of non-fiction writers and 65% of fiction writers believe AI will negatively impact their future income. And 22% of all respondents now use AI in their work, with non-fiction writers (25%) using it at higher rates than fiction writers (20%).

Journalism

American newsrooms are in freefall — for a combination of AI-related and structural reasons.

The Washington Post cut more than 300 jobs in February 2026 (roughly 30% of its workforce), with its executive editor explicitly noting that online traffic had dropped nearly 50% over three years, “partly due to the emergence of generative AI” drawing readers away from traditional outlets.

Condé Nast, Time, the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of digital outlets have all made major cuts. Since 2005, one in four U.S. newspapers has ceased operations.

For working writers, AI tools have simultaneously become a client expectation and a potential source of pay cuts.

Publishing

Publishers Weekly’s 2025 Salary & Jobs Report paints a picture of an industry increasingly uncomfortable with AI: 72% of publishing professionals said AI will be bad for publishing, up from 56% just one year earlier. The concerns break along experience lines: newer employees fear job losses, while veterans worry about copyright erosion and quality decline.

The business side of publishing is growing — the AAP reported total revenue up 4.1% in 2024 to $32.5 billion — but the distribution of who benefits is shifting. AI is accelerating self-publishing dramatically, with tools handling formatting, cover design, distribution, and even marketing. That compresses demand for the human professionals (editors, cover designers, formatters) who traditionally served both traditional and indie publishing pipelines.

Amazon KDP now requires authors to disclose AI-generated content — an early signal that the platforms themselves recognize the flood.

Editing

Editing is being squeezed from both ends. On one side, AI writing tools have eliminated the need for some editorial work by producing cleaner first drafts. On the other, the remaining editorial work is being degraded: writers report being asked to “clean up” AI-generated text rather than doing substantive developmental editing.

The Gracenote editor story from Blood in the Machine is a perfect case study of how editing jobs are eliminated in stages: the company used ML to automate the prioritization half of the job, then outsourced the writing/editing half to cheaper overseas labor. A team of 10 was reduced to 2 in a single month.

Medical writing and technical editing show a specific pattern: firms now generate content with AI and hire higher-credentialed people at lower rates to review it, effectively eliminating mid-career editorial roles entirely.

Songwriting and Music Composition

Songwriting faces a unique threat because AI music is directly competing for the same revenue streams. CISAC’s landmark global study projects that music creators could lose 24% of their revenues by 2028, with AI-generated music capturing roughly 20% of streaming platform revenues and 60% of music library revenues. That’s a cumulative loss of €10 billion over five years for music creators alone.

UK Music’s 2025 This Is Music report found that 66% of UK music creators believe AI poses a direct threat to their career, with only 13% disagreeing. Streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube are already integrating AI to curate playlists and fill catalog gaps.

As Forbes noted, “streaming services stand to save billions by substituting licensed music with AI-generated alternatives”.

Among active musicians, adoption is high but conflicted: 87% of producers say they use AI in their workflows, but primarily for technical tasks like mixing and mastering (79%), while 66% use it creatively for melodies, instruments, or vocals.

The concern is that as these tools improve, the line between “AI-assisted” and “AI-replaced” becomes invisible to listeners and platforms.

One emerging bright spot: licensing. Anthropic proposed paying $1.5 billion to settle copyright claims — roughly $3,000 per book — and HarperCollins negotiated deals worth $2,500–$5,000 per book with major AI companies. If these structures hold, they may create a new revenue stream for creators whose work trained the models.

Poetry

Poetry occupies an unusual position. A University of Pittsburgh study published in Nature Scientific Reports found that non-expert readers cannot reliably distinguish AI-generated poetry from work by Shakespeare, Dickinson, or Plath — and actually prefer the AI versions, rating them higher on quality, beauty, emotion, and originality. Researchers attributed this to AI poems being more “straightforward and accessible,” while human poetry’s complexity was mistaken for incoherence.

Poet Joelle Taylor (T.S. Eliot Prize winner) responded: “A poem transcends mere algorithms; it encapsulates empathy, revelation, passion, and surprise”.

The worry in the poetry world is less about direct job loss — poetry has never been economically viable for most practitioners — and more about cultural devaluation: if audiences can’t tell the difference and prefer the AI, what happens to poetry as a form of human expression?

Some poets see the opposite potential: that AI may spur a boom in experimental fiction and poetry as writers push to prove their humanity and create work AI cannot replicate.

Teaching Writing

The impact on writing instruction is structural. An AAUP (American Association of University Professors) survey found:

• 62% of faculty say AI has made the teaching environment at least somewhat worse

• 76% report reduced job enthusiasm

• 69% say AI has worsened student success outcomes

• 30% say pay equity has gotten worse

The core problem: if students can generate passable essays with AI, the entire pedagogical model built on writing-as-learning is threatened.

Adjunct instructors in high-enrollment survey courses are the most at risk of displacement, while research-intensive and mentorship-heavy roles remain insulated. A Pew Research survey found that nearly a third of experts predict AI could put teaching jobs at risk within two decades.

Inside Higher Ed projects “steady, incremental reductions” in instructional positions as AI tutoring systems mature. But the more immediate effect is work intensification: faculty now must redesign assignments, learn AI detection tools, and navigate constantly shifting institutional policies — all without additional compensation or time.

Translation and Localization

Translation is among the single hardest-hit writing subfields. The Society of Authors’ 2024 survey found 36% of translators have already lost work to AI, with 43% reporting decreased income. CISAC’s study projects that translators and adaptors for dubbing and subtitling will experience the strongest impact of any audiovisual creative role, with 56% of their revenue at risk.

Creator-focused surveys paint an even grimmer picture. A 2024 UK Society of Authors survey of nearly 800 respondents found that 36% of translators had already lost work directly due to generative AI.

The Common Thread Across All Writing Fields

Bloomberry’s 180-million-job-posting analysis captures the structural reality precisely:

“AI isn’t wiping out entire professions — it is dividing them.” Execution-based creative roles (copywriters, staff writers, technical writers) are being automated, while strategy-driven and leadership roles (creative directors, creative managers, creative producers) are holding steady.

The pattern across every writing discipline is:

• Junior and execution-level work is being eliminated or commoditized

• Remaining work is degraded — editing AI output instead of creating original work, at lower rates

• The “good enough” bar is what kills — not AI quality exceeding humans, but clients accepting AI quality as sufficient

• Income streams that subsidized creative writing (copywriting, translation, editing) are drying up, making creative work itself unsustainable

• Those who adopt AI intensively earn more — but there are far fewer of them, creating a winner-take-most dynamic

Mar Boerr. Eccentric Nature. Death to Stock.

Architecture

In architecture, 62% of UK architects are already using AI tools, though 84% view AI as augmenting their work rather than replacing it. The shift is toward AI handling technical execution while architects focus on strategic and conceptual thinking.

Goldman Sachs estimated that 37% of architecture and engineering work tasks “could be automated by AI”, placing it among the most-exposed professional fields.

The structural threat is subtle but significant: AI doesn’t replace architects one-for-one — it multiplies the output of a single architect. Xkool CEO Wanyu He estimates that one architect using AI can do the work of five, meaning practices need fewer people even as productivity rises.

As of March 2025, only 6% of American architects regularly use AI, per an American Institute of Architects study — suggesting the disruption wave has barely begun.

Morphosis founder Thom Mayne has said AI will reduce the size of individual studios to a “more intimate” level.

Dude, don’t insult people’s intelligence by spinning mass layoffs into something warm and desirable.

📰 Where can I learn more?

Some strong outlets that write up AI x Creatives coverage (with sourced rigor):

• The Atlantic — particularly their ongoing “AI & Labor” coverage (e.g., “The Problem With Letting AI Do the Grunt Work,” Dec. 2025)

• The New York Times — their technology and business desks, including the Feb. 2026 piece on AI-washing

• The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) — published a peer-reviewed essay by a University of Chicago computer science professor on AI replacing human artists

• Dezeen (architecture-specific) — rigorous industry coverage with cited sources

• PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey — annual, heavily cited

• World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 — comprehensive, data-driven

• Challenger, Gray & Christmas — the most-cited firm for layoff data broken down by AI causation

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If you’ve read this far, wow thanks for hanging in there. All this stuff in one place is a lot.

My forthcoming pieces will deep-dive into the question “What can I do?” A lot, in fact!

🗳️ If you feel better informed, please like or leave a comment.

Your thoughts and questions do inform future posts, plus help me understand what’s hitting you. This is a crucial, urgent topic; would love to know where you think I biffed and what I’m missing.

More soon, Kat xo

1. Like an LLM, I will tell you what’s driving my thinking:

All information was pulled by Perplexity.ai Pro, which I set to use Anthropic’s latest Claude Sonnet 4.6. I asked (grilled?) it the same context-rich question 5-6 times, with increasing specificity each time.

I limited those searches by requesting (commanding?) the best available reporting from “reputable” news outlets. Perplexity/Claude added widely-read research reports. All sources cited their findings.

It then summarized articles from: The Atlantic, Dezeen, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, McKinsey’s “AI in the Workplace: A Report for 2025”, The New York Times, the oft-cited Price Waterhouse Coopers’ “Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025”, Boston Consulting Group’s “AI at Work 2025: Momentum Builds but Gaps Remain”, among others.

I then re-wrote some of the results to be in my own voice, injected needed humor, and included some of my own insights from working with high-achieving creatives for 10+ years.

All to say, this review is incomplete and imperfect, like all things. I kept Perplexity/Claude’s writing for the hard reportage and stats. The synthesis (“so now what?”) parts were written by me.

Importantly, there is loads of bias toward the mainstream media and major American consulting companies — every one of which has an agenda.

Due to that, my AI-enabled research omits a lot of interesting and often brilliant ideas from: independent writers on platforms like Substack; creator-theorists on YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok; smaller, more niche reports put out by creative orgs; podcast content; personal blog posts that lack strong SEO and discoverability, etc.

2. Adebimpe & Sitek, “Staring at the Sun,” 2004.

3. Feist, “I Feel It All,” 2007.