Over the past four years the United States has lost more than 200,000 jobs in creative sectors, about 50,000 in the last year alone. It is one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern history, comparable only to the recessions of 2001 and 2008. This time, however, there is no broad recession: the decline coincides with AI systems able to produce novels, photorealistic images and music at very low cost. The question, posed by economist Joseph Politano in his newsletter Apricitas, is whether this marks the fall of the creative class.
Proving how many of these jobs AI has replaced is very hard. Media companies are guarded about their use of AI, both to avoid backlash and to protect the legal basis of their copyrights. AI's effects also overlap with other factors: consolidation in Hollywood, offshoring of content production and audiences shifting toward social media creators. The clearest signal, according to Politano, is that every digital arts subsector is losing jobs while live entertainment keeps growing.
Some losses continue existing trends, as in publishing, where technology has eroded newspaper and magazine jobs for decades. For live broadcasting, streaming and graphic design, the recent downturn is unusual. The hardest-hit sector is film and sound recording, which has lost jobs at an almost unprecedented pace for three years.
Hollywood has never seen a worse stretch: the film and TV industry has lost more than 100,000 jobs, nearly a third of the total. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, employment in film and sound recording fell to 322,300 in June, its lowest level since 1995 excluding the pandemic years. Shoot days in Los Angeles fell from 36,792 in 2022 to 19,694 in 2025. Streaming has made the transition difficult, as traditional content loses viewing time to user-generated flows increasingly assisted or created by AI.
Overall, nearly half of media job losses are concentrated in film and sound recording. Written publishing is next, with more than 70,000 fewer jobs. The pace shows no sign of slowing: losses hover around 50,000 a year and have even accelerated recently.
The music precedent
To understand what could happen to art with AI, Politano looks at the previous digital revolution. In the early 2000s Metallica sued Napster over illegal file-sharing. They won and Napster went bankrupt, but the technology had already made piracy impossible to contain. The value of individual songs collapsed, and platforms like Spotify and Apple Music acquired huge catalogues and offered access at modest prices.
Music has never regained CD-era revenues. For artists the model shifted: the record became an advertisement for concerts and merchandise, which now generate most income. This penalised smaller musicians, forced into constant touring, but saved the sector from collapse. Film and publishing, lacking a live component to fall back on, were hit harder.
The difference shows in live employment: performing arts and spectator sports grew by about 67,000 jobs over the same four years, because they depend on people gathering in one place.
What the research says
Richard Florida, the urbanist who coined the term "creative class" in 2002, is not convinced AI will eliminate those jobs. "I'm not sure his numbers are right," he told Fortune, "but I don't think it's going to eliminate those jobs. I think it's going to make certain kinds of creative work more valuable." Florida expects AI to hit entry-level grind work hardest, while judgment, taste and originality gain value.
An Otis College analysis of California, cited by the sources, estimates the state lost about 114,000 creative economy jobs since late 2022, roughly 14%. According to the same analysis, half the loss reflects national trends and half California-specific conditions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also projects that demand for writers, graphic designers and photographers will be dampened by growing AI use.
The answer remains open. AI looks like a real factor in the decline of creative jobs, but its precise share is still hard to measure, and the picture depends on many other forces acting on the same market.
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