Creative jobs shrink, and AI gets blamed for part of it
A thread asked how much of America's 200,000 lost jobs in media, film and the arts is AI. The answers leaned on demand, not just automation. People are spending hours on TikTok and long YouTube videos instead of film and TV. One commenter quoted Southwest's CEO on 'demand destruction' from pricing, and another simply said the output has been garbage. Next to that, 'What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us' argued that AI 'built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive.'
The pattern: it is hard to separate AI substitution from a long shift in how people spend attention. The Adobe piece suggests a second-order risk. If AI companies commoditize the work their customers sell, their own customer base shrinks.
Nobody in these threads had clean data. The 200k figure sits in a market that was already under pressure from streaming and short video.
So what?
Don't build on the assumption that AI-generated creative output will find paying buyers just because it is cheap. Free output pushes down the value of what you sell, and the people who bought it. Pick a layer where the customer's revenue goes up, not one where you quietly erase it.