The AI boom has, unsuprisingly, coincided with the bleeding of creative jobs in the U.S.
The country has lost more than 200,000 jobs over the past four years across creative industries including film, TV, publishing, and graphic design, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by economist Joseph Politano. Roughly 50,000 of those jobs disappeared within the last year.
In the Sept. 27 edition of his newsletter, Apricitas Economics, Politano described it as “one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history.”
The last time these industries sustained this level of job losses was during the recessions of 2001 and 2008 however, there is no broader recession. Instead, the downturn has coincided alongside the rise of generative AI tools capable of generating novels, images, songs, videos, and other forms of digital art at increasingly low cost
Politano doesn’t conclusively state that AI is responsible for all those lost jobs. He notes that it is difficult to distinguish AI’s impact from other forces that were alredy impacting these fields, like media consolidation, movie production moving overseas, and the growing popularity of social media influencers.
Still, he points to one notable dyanmic in the data. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, employment has fallen across several areas of digital media and creative work, including graphic design, broadcasting, publishing, and movie and sound recording. Meanwhile, jobs tied more closely to in-person experiences, including museums and performing arts, have continued to grow.
The hardest-hit sector has been movie and sound recording. The film and TV industry has lost more than 100,000 jobs over the past four years, or nearly one-third of its workforce Publishing has been the second-largest
And creative industries aren’t the only part of the economy where employment gains have slowed down as AI use has grown. Politano also points to the tech sector, which added nearly 300,000 jobs in 2022 before entering what he describes as its longest labor-market downturn.
But Politano’s analysis isn’t all doom and gloom. He also looks at how creative industries have evolved amid other major technological advances in the past.
The music industry, for instance, adapted to the rise of online piracy and streaming by leaning more heavily on live tours and merchandise sales as physical album sales declined.
More recently, after years of struggling sales, BookTok has helped drive a resurgence in book sales.
“It’s possible that AI tools could have those same totally unpredictable spillovers for other museums, concerts, or other forms of art in ways that are unpredictable today, in much the same way short-form video saved books in ways that could never have been anticipated beforehand,” wrote Politano.
