Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI

After the launch ChatGPT sparked the generative AI boom in Silicon Valley in late 2022, it was mere months before OpenAI turned to selling the software as an automation product for businesses. (It was first called Team, then Enterprise.) And it wasn’t long after that before it became clear that the jobs managers were likeliest to automate successfully weren’t the dull, dirty, and dangerous ones that futurists might have hoped: It was, largely, creative work that companies set their sights on. After all, enterprise clients soon realized that the output of most AI systems was too unreliable and too frequently incorrect to be counted on for jobs that demand accuracy. But creative work was another story.

As a result, some of the workers that have been most impacted by clients and bosses embracing AI have been in creative fields like art, graphic design, and illustration. Since the LLMs trained and sold by Silicon Valley companies have ingested countless illustrations, photos, and works of art (without the artists’ permission), AI products offered by Midjourney, OpenAI, and Anthropic can recreate images and designs tailored to a clients’ needs—at rates much cheaper than hiring a human artist. The work will necessarily not be original, and as of now it’s not legal to copyright AI-generated art, but in many contexts, a corporate client will deem it passable—especially for its non-public-facing needs.

This is why you’ll hear artists talk about the “good enough” principle. Creative workers aren’t typically worried that AI systems are so good they’ll be rendered obsolete as artists, or that AI-generated work will be better than theirs, but that clients, managers, and even consumers will deem AI art “good enough” as the companies that produce it push down their wages and corrode their ability to earn a living. (There is a clear parallel to the Luddites here, who were skilled technicians and clothmakers who weren’t worried about technology surpassing them, but the way factory owners used it to make cheaper, lower-quality goods that drove down prices.)

Sadly, this seems to be exactly what’s been happening, at least according to the available anecdata. I’ve received so many stories from artists about declining work offers, disappearing clients, and gigs drying up altogether, that it’s clear a change is afoot—and that many artists, illustrators, and graphic designers have seen their livelihoods impacted for the worse. And it’s not just wages. Corporate AI products are inflicting an assault on visual arts workers’ sense of identity and self-worth, as well as their material stability.

Not just that, but as with translators, the subject of the last installment of AI Killed My Job, there’s a widespread sense that AI companies are undermining a crucial pillar of what makes us human; our capacity to create and share art. Some of these stories, I will warn you, are very hard to read—to the extent that this is a content warning for descriptions of suicidal ideation—while others are absurd and darkly funny. All, I think, help us better understand how AI is impacting the arts and the visual arts industry. A sincere thanks to everyone who wrote in and shared their stories.

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,” as the from SF author Joanna Maciejewska memorably put it, “not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” These stories show what happens when it’s the other way around.

A quick note before we proceed: Soliciting, curating, and editing these stories, as well as producing them, is a time-consuming endeavor. I can only do this work thanks to readers who chip in $6 a month, or $60 a year—the cost of a decent cup of coffee, or a coffee table book, respectively. If you find value in it, and you’re able, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I would love to expand the scope and reach of this work. Many thanks, and onward.

Edited by Mike Pearl.

I work in the field of constructing costumes for live entertainment: theater, film/TV, ballet/opera, touring performers, etc.

Budget and scale is all over the map, from low-budget storefront theater in which one person designs and secures costumes for a production, up to a big-budget Broadway spectacular, which can have a dozen people on the design team alone and literally hundreds of makers creating the costumes from designs developed by the design team.

I’m seeing this happen typically on the low-budget to midrange end—community theater/high school theater, independent film, etc.: Producers and directors eliminating the position of costume designer in favor of AI image generation.

It comes up often in professional forums in the field, someone will share the AI generated costume. “designs” and they will be literally impossible to construct for an actual human with materials available in the actual world— gravity-defying materials on pornographically cartoon bodies, etc.

-Rachel E. Pollock

I remember reading about the new stage of generative AI engines sometime in late 2022 in the NY Times, and seeing Dall-E and Midjourney's outputs and knowing it will mean trouble. Until then AI was making laughable 'art.' Really bad stuff. But all of a sudden the engines had leveled up.

I have been working in the comics and publishing industry for over 20 years, but the majority of my income was usually coming from work with advertising agencies. Whenever they needed to present an idea to a client I would come in and help with illustrations, and sometimes storyboards, this was all internal and would never be published, but it was still great to get paid for doing what I love most—drawing. I felt appreciated for my skills and liked working with other people.

It was in 2023 that It seemed like overnight all those jobs disappeared. On one of my very last jobs I was asked to make an illustrated version of an AI generated image, after that, radio silence. I had my suspicions that AI was the culprit, but could not know for sure, there was also a general downturn in the advertising industry at the time.

Finally I reached out to one of the art directors I work with and he confirmed that the creatives are using AI like crazy, there was no aspect of shame in presenting an AI illustration internally, no one would call you out on it, and it's sure as hell cheaper than using an illustrator. I had to deal with a sudden, very scary decrease in income. Meanwhile it felt like AI slop was mocking me from every corner of the internet, and every big company was promoting their new AI assistant. I was just disgusted with all these corporations jumping on the AI bandwagon not thinking of what the outcomes could be. and additionally, there was the insult of knowing that the engines were trained on working illustrators, including mine!

I used my free time to work on a new graphic novel, and eventually leaned into more comics work, which paid (a lot) less, but at least felt more creatively satisfying. The two years following the loss of work were difficult, definitely felt like the rug was taken out from under my feet, and I'm still adjusting to the new landscape, although I feel better about where I am now, I work harder than ever before, for less money. But at least the work will be seen by readers.

I'm hoping that in the world of comics the public shame of replacing an artist with AI will hold off the use of the technology, but I'm sure that one day it will become a lot more accepted. I feel like we live in an age where technological changes are happening too rapidly, and are not in any way reined in by the government, and humans can lose their job in the drop of a hat, with no sense of security or help. We are just not built for these fast changes. I'm happy to see people sobering up to the downside of this technology, and hoping the hype would die down soon.

-Anonymous

I've been out of work for a while now. I made children's book illustrations, stock art, and took various art commissions.

Now I have several maxed out credit cards and use a donation bin for food. I haven't had a steady contract in over a year. two weeks ago, when a client who has switched to AI found out about this he gave me $50 out of "a sense of guilt." Basically pity for the fact that Illustrator, as a job, does not exist anymore.

It was my birthday recently and I sincerely considered not living anymore.
The worst part of all is that the parents who once supported me fully in being an artist sent me an AI generated picture of a caricature of themselves holding a birthday cake with my name spelled incorrectly.

I feel cheated, like if I could go back in time and tell the younger me in high school that all the practice, all the love, and all the hope from your parents and friends for your future gets you is carpal tunnel and poverty, I could have gone into a better job field. I'd be an electrician or welder.

I have a resume with skills that are appealing to no one, as slop can be generated for free.

I sold my colored pencils and markers and illustration tablet on Facebook marketplace for a steal once a previous client who I considered a friend boasted on LinkedIn that AI was the future of cost reduction above an image of a man in a suit who looked like him with six fingers holding a wad of cash.

I have applied to over one thousand jobs and I stopped keeping track. My disability didn’t effect making art, but makes me a poor candidate for much else.

It was my birthday recently and I sincerely considered not living anymore.

The worst part of all is that the parents who once supported me fully in being an artist sent me an AI generated picture of a caricature of themselves holding a birthday cake with my name spelled incorrectly. My friends all post themselves as cartoons online.

The person I married had a secret file on their computer labeled "AI pics" they thought I didn't notice.

I will wither away eating stale food from the garbage while everyone else is complacent with the slop generator doing what I used to put passion into and finely detail.

I don't think it's going to get better.

-Anonymous

A piece of “photo imaging” art by Susan Oakes. According to Oakes, Photoshop classes geared toward creating art like this suddenly aren’t in demand.

I have taught various graphic courses but overwhelmingly Photoshop, the 800 lb. gorilla of the graphics world. I am not a photographer and I do not teach people to take photos, but to manipulate them, also known as Photo Imaging.

They are done by manually placing several images into a composite, and then enhancing them by various digital techniques such as layering, blending, masking etc. to arrive at a final result. Most people who take my classes don’t necessarily want to do all that I do, but want to know how to correct or otherwise manipulate photos to create their own projects. 

I’m turning more to “natural media” (non-digital) art, specifically painting. I am developing a course to teach watercolor painting to adults and I’m quite excited by this prospect.

Since the advent of Artificial Intelligence and Photoshop’s version, Firefly, my teaching and private tutoring have pretty much dropped dead. There is very little incentive for people to learn these techniques when they can conjure up an image by text prompts. It takes virtually no skill to do this besides the ability to read and write. I have played around with A.I. for personal projects, with varying degrees of success. Some of it is amazing, and some of it is laughable. However, there is no escaping the reality that these models were trained on existing artwork already online. It’s essentially plagiarism on steroids. Also known as theft. Not to mention the obscene energy costs involved.

Had this happened to me 20 years ago I would have been devastated. But at this point in my life (I’m 71) it is not as important as it once was. I’ve had some success both in client work and also creating digital art pieces for which I’ve won accolades. I’ve found satisfaction in teaching but now I’m turning more to “natural media” (non-digital) art, specifically painting. I am developing a course to teach watercolor painting to adults and I’m quite excited by this prospect. I have been married over 50 years and we have never relied on my income to survive.

-Susan Oakes

I worked in the video game industry, as a 3D artist.

In early 2023, when AI image generation was hitting the mainstream, I was working as a temporary contractor at a large games and technology company.

Our boss was very enthusiastic about AI image generation, and he showed us how he was using AI to generate some of the textures for the game. I realized that if AI image generation didn't exist, then the company would have needed to hire an extra artist to do that work. I could have recommended a dozen colleagues who were looking for work at the time. It felt like AI was directly taking money out of artist's pockets, and allowing the companies to keep it all.

When my contract with that company ended, I did an exit interview with my boss. I expressed concerns about being able to find further work. He handwaved me, saying "There's always work out there."

I have not been able to find any work since then.

There were several factors as to why there were so many layoffs in games and technology in 2023-2024, but I know that AI has played a role.

I miss working as a 3D artist.

-Anonymous

I am a freelance 3D/2D Generalist. Over the past decade plus, I've had a recurring gig of being hired as a contractor to help create supplemental graphics and B-roll for various documentary-style programs. Everything from infographics about military tanks to 3D animations of prehistoric creatures to recreations of scenes involving historical figures.

If you've ever watched any History show, you know the format: footage of the host and experts speaking, then sometimes video clips or photographs, and then typically animated content that illustrates the points the speaker is making. That final category was, until recently, made by people like me. That market has completely dried up.

My job loss is merely a side-effect of AI killing off studios higher up the chain that each represent dozens more people being put out of work.

A couple of years ago, as soon as demos of AI-generated video began to appear, there were almost immediate rumblings that the specific business of creating documentary-style graphics would be disrupted. The logic being that, while the public might reject a feature-length AI-slop theatrical film, the at-home audience for shows about military history or ghosts or aliens might be less-discerning. That theory is now being tested. History Channel is currently airing a season of "Life After People" that heavily features AI-generated visuals, and I'm sure there are more shows in the pipeline being made the same way. We'll see how audiences respond.

As much as I would like to say viewers will reject the AI style and demand a return to human-made art, I'm not convinced it will happen. Even if it did, it might soon be too late to turn back. I know that there are studios with expert producers, writers, and showrunners with decades of experience in this exact genre who are closing their doors. That institutional knowledge will be gone.

That's probably the bigger point: this trend is not only affecting artists like me, but also the types of companies I contract for. Obviously I lament my own loss of those stable gigs, but my job loss is merely a side-effect of AI killing off studios higher up the chain that each represent dozens more people being put out of work.

-Anonymous

I work as a freelance illustrator (focusing on comics and graphic novels but also doing book covers or whatever else might come my way) and as a "day job" I do pre-press graphic design work for a screen printing and embroidery company in Seattle. Because of our location, we handle large orders (sometimes 10k shirts at a time) for corporate clients—including some of the biggest companies in the world (Microsoft, Amazon, MLB, NHL, etc.) and my job is to create client proofs where I mock up the art on the garment and call out PMS colors as applicable. I also do the color separations to prepare the art file for screen printing. 

[H]e instructed me to start plugging in the names of living artists to generate entire artworks in their style and the first time I did it I realized how horrifyingly wrong this actually was.

When AI first came on the scene, I was approached by a potential client that was self-funding a mobile game and wanted to commission me to create in-game art. He asked what my standard rate was and then offered to double it if I allowed him to pay in etherium (which I knew nothing about at that point.) I immediately had some concerns, but I'm a struggling artist so I took the gig anyway and crossed my fingers. He then introduced me to generative AI and encouraged me to use it to create game content quickly. At first I was interested in the possibility of using it to reduce my workload by maybe generating simple elements I get tired of painting—like grasses or leaves—but he instructed me to start plugging in the names of living artists to generate entire artworks in their style and the first time I did it I realized how horrifyingly wrong this actually was. After that I resisted and tried to use my own art. He grew frustrated with me pretty quickly and I left the company after less than 2 weeks (I was never paid; he owes/owed me about $1300).`

Since then, I have been very outspoken against generative AI and haven't touched it again. I was the moderator for a very large group of children's book illustrators (250k members) and I helped institute and enforce a strict AI ban within the group. While this was mostly a positive thing, there were quite a few occasions where legitimate artists were targeted for harassment over accusations of AI use. Some of them were even driven out of the group, in spite of our interventions and assurances that the person was not using AI. 

In my own freelancing work, I have now been accused of using AI as well. I like to do fan art from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern [series], and sometimes when I'm looking for work I will post my art and past commissions in fan groups to see if anyone wants to hire me to draw their original characters based on the Pern books. Almost invariably now someone will ask if my art is AI generated. It used to bother me more than it does now, I'm growing a little numb to it.

My coworker at my screen printing job (in spite of knowing my negative feelings on the matter because I had cried after I found several dozen pieces of my art in the LAION dataset) chose to plug my art into an AI generator and asked for it to imitate my style—which it did poorly, might I add. It felt extremely violating. 

Lastly, in my role as a graphic designer, we often now have to deal with clients sending art files in for screen printing that were generated with AI. It's a pain in the ass because these files are often low-resolution and the weird smudgy edges in most AI images don't make for easy color separations. When a human graphic designer sits down to create a design, they typically leave layers in place that can be individually manipulated and that makes my job much easier. AI flattens everything so I have to manually separate out design elements if I want to independently adjust anything. The text is still frequently garbled or unreadable. The fonts don't actually exist so they can't easily be matched. These clients are also almost invariably cheap, and get upset when they're told that it's going to be a $75 per hr art charge to fix the image so it's suitable for screening.

Also, and here I don't have any data, just my personal anecdotal experience, but it feels like some of these companies have laid off so much of their in-house graphic design staff that they are increasingly reliant on us as a print service to fix up stuff they'd formerly done for themselves. I get simple graphic design requests every day by people who should have had the resources to handle this themselves but now they're expecting me to pick up the slack for the employees they've let go for the sake of our working relationship and keeping them on as clients. It's become such a drag on our small business that my boss is considering extra fees. (Which, considering the slim margins in the garment industry, is really saying something!) I am convinced Microsoft does not have any in-house graphic designers left at this point. Okay I joke, but man, it's bleak.

I have no way of knowing how many gigs I've lost to AI, since it's hard to prove a negative. I'm not significantly less busy than I was before, and my income hasn't really changed for better or worse. There's more stress and fear, greater workloads cleaning up badly-done AI-generated images on behalf of people looking for a quick fix, instead of getting to do my own creative stuff. And it felt deeply and profoundly cruel to have my life's work trained on without my consent, and then put to use creating images like deepfakes or child sexual abuse materials. That one was really hard for me as a mom. I'd rather cut my own heart out than contribute to something like that.

There's a part of me that will never forgive the tech industry for what they've taken from me and what they've chosen to do with it. In the early days as the dawning horror set in, I cried about this almost every day. I wondered if I should quit making art. I contemplated suicide. I did nothing to these people, but every day I have to see them gleefully cheer online about the anticipated death of my chosen profession. I had no idea we artists were so hated—I still don't know why. What did my silly little cat drawings do to earn so much contempt? That part is probably one of the hardest consequences of AI to come to terms with. It didn't just try to take my job (or succeed in making my job worse) it exposed a whole lot of people who hate me and everything I am for reasons I can't fathom. They want to exploit me and see me eradicated at the same time. 

-Melissa

I’m a South African illustrator, and designer with 20 years of experience, and in my industry, I saw things going pear-shaped even before gen AI hit the scene.

One the main places I get jobs from is on Upwork (one of those gig type work platforms), and I’ve noticed a couple of things: A decrease in job offerings for the illustration I typically do (like book covers).

I’ve also noticed a lot more job offers to “fix” an AI generated cover. These authors offer less money because of “the work is pretty much done” attitude.

Since Upwork added an AI function to help potential employers write their briefs, there’s been a surge in what I’m pretty sure are fake jobs. The job listings all sound very samey obviously because of the format the ai uses, and the employers have no history on the platform of ever having hired anyone and don’t have their phone or bank linked. So I think what might be happening is that some evil person/persons are creating fake accounts and posting fake jobs so that their competitors waste credits applying for these jobs.

-Roxane Lapa

I got my start on deviantart, moved on to furaffinity and various other websites. I used to take commissions in the furry fandom drawing futa furries with big fat tits and dicks. In the past year or two my commissions have all but dried up, in the time it can take me to do the lineart for an anthropomorphic quokka's foreskin, someone can just go onto one of a dozen websites and knock something of tolerable quality out in no time at all.

AI has ruined a once sacred artform.

-Anonymous

-Anonymous

I was running research on [Adobe’s] stock marketplace, trying to understand how customers were adopting the new Gen A.I. tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. Internally Adobe was launching their own text-to-image A.I. generator called Firefly but it hadn’t been announced. I was on the betas for Firefly and Generative Fill (GenFill) for Photoshop and ran workshops with designers on the Firefly team. I tested the new tooling internally and gave feedback on Adobe Slack channels and their ethics committee.

A.I. generated content started to flood the Adobe Stock website as stock contributors quickly switched from adding and uploading photos to prompting and creating assets with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Firefly and then selling them back on Adobe Stock. Users wanted a better search experience but it was never explicitly clear if they wanted more A.I. slop, although Reddit forums indicated otherwise.

During the GenFill beta, I raised concerns about model bias after prompting the model to edit an image of then president Joe Biden across racial categories and having the model return a Black man with cornrows—without taking into account relevant and contextual surrounding information in the image. The ethics committee pointed me to a boilerplate Word doc with their guiding principles and we had a short Microsoft Teams call, but there wasn’t any real concern from their end. After raising additional red flags inside an Adobe Slack channel about Photoshop’s GenFill beta possibly being used to create misinformation at scale the main response I got was a blasé “Photoshop, making misinformation since 1990…” Long story long, the people internally working on these products really don’t care. In another company all hands meeting about text-to-vector capabilities fellow workers shared thoughts and concerns on the impact of AI tooling to the livelihoods of artists, illustrators and other designers in the Teams chat and no one cared. In another meeting when asked about artist’s rights a manager quipped “In the research from AdobeMAX (Adobe’s annual conference) someone said they were willing to sell their ‘artistic style’ for around the price of a car” when gathering data around AI-style mimicry and trust.

The Firefly model still struggled to render hands and certain objects with difficulty and an Adobe company wide email sent to all employees encouraged us to sign up for an upcoming photoshoot on a green screen, holding things like trumpets, accordions, rubber chickens and asked employees to make awkward expressions like being surprised with “mouth open” or squinting while putting your finger in your ear in exchange for a free lunch. 

Some time in 2023 Adobe paid for photographers to document crowds of people during a concert in Seattle and had attendees sign waivers releasing their likeness since Firefly had trouble rendering and distinguishing people in crowds. Shortly thereafter I was told my staff role was being eliminated. They didn’t let me switch teams. They gave me six weeks to find a new job inside the company and six weeks of severance pay. During the six weeks of “offboarding” as they called it I applied to dozens of internal jobs at Frame.io and other teams like Acrobat within the company and it never went anywhere. 

-Anonymous

I just graduated in June from a two-year intensive vocational program in graphic design. It's probably still too early in my job search for me to say that AI "killed my job," but my classmates and I, as well as students from the class just ahead of us, are certainly struggling to find work.

Why I wanted to reach out, though, is to share what my experience was as a student studying design in the midst of the peak years of this AI hype. Basically our entire second-year curriculum in one of our five classes, which was previously focused on UX, UI, web design, etc, transitioned to being largely generative AI-focused. I don't think I'm overstating matters to say that no one in my class was happy about this; none of us decided to go (back) to school for design to learn Midjourney or Runway.

Is it always going to be like this? I love learning, but am I always going to feel like I need to acquire skills in at least five new expensive SAS platforms to survive?

[One instructor] has lived through and had his career significantly impacted by past shifts in the industry (he was a full-time web designer when platforms like Squarespace came along), so my charitable read is that he wants to prepare us for a lifetime of learning new tools to stay employable. I think the faculty in our program are also hearing from alumni and their technical advisory board that AI tools are becoming more important for local companies (we live in a pretty tech-centric city). So while he's sympathetic, I guess, he's still choosing to go all-in on AI, and to push his students to do the same.

In our other classes, AI use was varied. Some of our instructors allowed it; a couple still forbid it completely.

I came out of school feeling like... I guess I'm grateful to know what's out there, for the sake of my own employability in this really awful job market. I really feel for designers whose school days are a little further behind them. It's not just AI that makes me say this—in fact, even if things like image and video generators find a more permanent place in graphic arts careers, they're changing fast enough that whatever we learned in school is likely to be outdated pretty quickly. If all the angry posts I see on LinkedIn from more senior designers are any indication, there's been a trend in hiring for a while of companies looking for a designer who also does video, animation, UX/UI, and many other things that aren't really graphic design. Our program taught us a lot of those skills, so maybe, if the current economic circumstances improve, our class might be okay. But it makes me worry a lot for our future. Is it always going to be like this? I love learning, but am I always going to feel like I need to acquire skills in at least five new expensive SAS platforms to survive?

Even our AI-booster instructor told us over and over again that computers will never replace the need for creative design thinking and empathy. That, he said, is what we should lean into to distinguish ourselves and ensure our employability. But there are only so many positions out there for art directors, and not everyone who studies design wants to do that. Production design gets looked down on as "menial" by some, I think, but it used to be the pipeline into more senior design positions--and if that goes away, how do new designers even get into the field? And what about people who have worked in production their whole lives?

-Anonymous

Another piece of photo imaging art by Susan Oakes.

I am a freelancer of a few trades, so it can be hard to measure lost work, because I can also wonder if I'm slow because times are slow, or a typical cycle, or AI.

I can tell you this: ALL my "lighter" graphic design work—making social media or print ad graphics, designing logos—has totally dried up. I was actually more worried about this when Canva came out, but even then they wanted my eye and my touch on things, so having the tools to do it themselves didn't really deter people from hiring me. I did this kind of work for some local small businesses, organizations, event venues. This was an abrupt change within the past couple years.

They are usually thinking they will pay for a couple hours of my time, when what they are asking for could require maybe 100 hours. The "mistakes" […] are in the bones of the art.

My illustration work is mostly picture books, and while my work has remained steady (I do 1-3 a year), the number of inquiries I've gotten from new authors has dropped to nearly zero, when I used to field a few a month and usually book myself out for the next year. Also, through Upwork and other various avenues I find work, I've had quite a few people (presumably authors) reach out to me to "fix" their AI generated art. It does depend on the task at hand but it's a 90% certainty that fixing the art will take nearly as long as just doing it myself. Of course they aren't coming to me with AI generated work because they intended to hire a full-blown illustrator. They are usually thinking they will pay for a couple hours of my time, when what they are asking for could require maybe 100 hours.

The "mistakes" AI makes on art for something like a picture book, which requires consistency of a lot of different elements across at minimum 16 or so pages, are so deep that they are in the bones of the art. It's not airbrushing out a sixth finger; it's making the faux colored pencil look the same across pages, or all the items in a cluttered room be represented consistently from different angles, or make the different characters look like they came from the same universe. It's bad at that stuff and it's not surface level. A lot of time potential clients don't know why the art isn't working and it's because it's these all-encompassing characteristics.

-Melissa E. Vandiver