If you work in a creative industry or media, you probably don’t need anybody to tell you how bad things have gotten.
Still, even the most intimate first-hand knowledge can’t prepare you for the sheer scope of the devastation. As data journalist Joseph Politano found in a new Substack post, the US has lost more than 200,000 jobs in “creative” industries over the past four years — the period since the first version of ChatGPT became available to the public — with almost 50,000 of those losses coming in the last year alone.
The data comes from the US Bureau of Labor statistics, the trustworthiness of which has been repeatedly undermined since Donald Trump’s return to office. Still, it remains one of the most robust and widely-used indicators of macroeconomic job data, for analysts trying to make sense of the increasingly bleak job market.
“That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history,” Politano observes, “with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008.”
Politano notes the steepest losses came in digital arts like graphic design, broadcasting, publishing, as well as films and sound recording. Though some sections of the live arts sector have actually grown precipitously — museum work and performing arts, to be precise — other types of live arts jobs, like “employment to an independent artist” have plummeted compared to years past.
As a whole, job growth in media and creative industries has remained negative since 2023, as tools like generative AI — shoddy as they still are — provide an easily accessible alternative to human design, video, literary, and audio work.
Though it’s never been easy to secure consistent employment in these industries, the rise of AI and the general decay of the labor economy has clearly made it harder than ever before, and the losses show little sign of stopping anytime soon.
More on AI and labor: Workers Are Spending An Astonishing Amount of Their Own Money On AI for Their Jobs
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