The creative industries undoubtedly face disruption from generative AI, but to what extent? And where will it lead?
Timelines and trajectories remain fluid, but as these technologies emulate what we most thought were uniquely human skills, anxiety amongst creatives is spreading.
Generative AI’s impending impact on the creative sector was acknowledged in early 2023 when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike within the US.
The WGA represents the country’s entertainment and media writing industry; the strike advocated for fairer rules surrounding streaming payments and protection from AI job losses.
Virginia Doellgast, Professor of Employment Relations and Dispute Resolution at Cornell University in New York, said of the WGA strike, “The fear is that AI may very well be used to supply first drafts of shows, after which a small variety of writers would work off of those scripts.”
At that point, interest in generative AI across Hollywood’s film and TV industry was growing, with the AI on the Lot event in LA demonstrating tons of of exhibits on how AI will shape the industry.
This included some pretty lewd examples of AI tools generating cartoons, film scenes, animations, and other artwork.
An attendee captured the mood: “Energy at a high, but additionally anxiety. This is what innovation appears like.”
Later in 2023, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union joined the WGA within the first dual Hollywood strike in 60 years.
AI was a frontline issue, with Hollywood A-listers decreeing an end to the technology’s influence over the creative sector.
Both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA eventually struck deals to curb AI’s impact on jobs for the following few years, but these could prove short-lived as generative AI maintains relentless progress.
Amidst this backdrop of labor disputes, the entertainment industry can be grappling with a wave of layoffs. High-profile firms throughout the sector, including giants like Riot Games, Unity Software, Amazon MGM Studios, Pixar, and Universal Music Group, announced job cuts throughout the first few weeks of 2024.
These layoffs were attributed to a wide range of aspects, including economic pressures, shifting business strategies, and the necessity to streamline operations within the face of technological advancements.
Companies typically deny the involvement of AI of their decisions to chop jobs – or a minimum of cite it as a short-term catalyst slightly than a deciding factor.
For example, when Duolingo laid off staff for AI replacements, the corporate stated, “We can confirm that some Duolingo staff haven’t been renewed upon the completion of their projects at the tip of 2023. But these will not be layoffs. This affected a small minority of Duolingo staff, as the bulk have been retained.”
To onlookers within the creative industry, early layoffs are the smoking gun precipitating an imminent avalanche of job losses.
A collective groan of uneasy acceptance has rung out across the creative industries: “It begins.”
Understanding the extent of AI job losses for the creative industry
What evidence do now we have of AI-related job losses within the creative industries besides anecdotes?
Data on AI’s impacts on jobs stays thin, but there are several studies we are able to take a look at.
One recent study, Future Unscripted, drew on 300 leaders across the entertainment industry and located that California alone will feel the complete force of AI-related job losses within the US, with 62,000 jobs inside film, television, music, and gaming being disrupted over the following three years.
This figure balloons to an estimated 204,000 jobs nationwide, highlighting a broader trend of technological upheaval across the sector.
And there it’s. Study shows 204,000 entertainment jobs shall be disrupted by AI over the following 3 years. Some of essentially the most impacted people in film are artists like me and my friends. When someone hand waves your concerns, show them this study. Be loud. https://t.co/wcSUZmgtop pic.twitter.com/asAbIkY6sc
The Animation Guild commissioned the study and intends to make use of it to fortify its defenses against AI, which indicates it isn’t essentially the most objective evaluation.
However, predictions are the very best now we have until job losses pick up pace and objective evidence involves the fore. The figures don’t seem hyperbolic or unrealistic.
The report also touches on specific sectors throughout the entertainment industry. The film, television, and animation sector, with a workforce of nearly 550,000, will suffer a few of the worst effects, with 21% of jobs disrupted by 2026 attributable to the combination of generative AI into tasks like 3D modeling, character design, and voice generation.
Some 44% of firms on this sector already use generative AI for 3D modeling tasks and 39% for character and environment design.
In music and sound recording, generative AI adoption is slower, with an expected 1,800 jobs in danger by 2026. Voice generation, a field led by firms like ElevenLabs, can have a key impact here.
The gaming industry, characterised by rapid technological evolution, embraces generative AI, with 86.7% of firms identified as early adopters. By 2026, AI could impact 13.4% of this sector’s workforce, or 52,400 jobs. We’ve seen generative AI products from leading game design platforms like Unity, which was criticized last yr for ripping off artists’ data in an effort to exchange them.
Brandon Jarratt, a outstanding figure on the Animation Guild’s executive board and its AI task force, said of the report, “The data is a window into the attitudes and intentions of essentially the most powerful people within the industry in the case of AI.”
He further elaborated on the underlying fears related to AI, attributing them to the studios’ relentless pursuit of cost-cutting measures to meet financial projections, which could potentially exploit AI technologies.
Nicole Hendrix, co-founder of the Concept Art Association, who found the findings “chilling,” also said, “When you’re taking a look at any technology that’s essentially replacing [or consolidating] a junior or entry-level role … it’s harming the ecosystem.”
Just a few other studies have assessed AI job losses. A recent MIT study found AI-related job losses in ‘vision-related’ fields would hit 40% of some sectors by 2030, and the WEF found some 60% of jobs in ‘advanced economies’ may very well be affected without intervention.
Low-wage jobs within the US may very well be practically eliminated by 2030, says one other report, and IBM said some 40% of individuals in some sectors might want to re-skill.
3,900 out of 80,000 corporate lay-offs were attributed to AI in May last yr, in line with an employment report.
There’s sure to be more concrete evidence this yr.
Creative philosophies within the generative AI era
Another incident was chucked into the melting pot when Midjourney, which develops AI image generation models, was exposed for using the kinds of 16,000 artists without their consent.
Artists were reeling from the ramifications of this disclosure when a study exposed Midjourney’s proficiency in generating near-perfect clones of copyrighted work.
Cognitive scientist Dr. Gary Marcus and concept artist Reid Southen released their study in IEEE titled “Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem.” It revealed that even vague prompts could see MidJourney precisely recreate blatantly copyrighted work.
Dr. Marcus recently said on X, “When I began working on AI 4 a long time ago, it simply didn’t occur to me that one in every of the largest use cases could be derivative mimicry, transferring value from artists and other creators to megacorporations, using massive amounts of energy. This will not be the AI I dreamed of.”
Generative AI is scary introspection about what creativity and art mean in an era where near-perfect copies of any digital work are but a prompt away.
Digital artists are already closing up shop and reskilling, not simply because their jobs are under pressure but since the soul of their craft has been brought into disrepute.
This spotlights deeper, more existential concerns concerning the essence of creativity, artistic integrity, and the sanctity of mental property, and within this debate, we’ve caught a glimpse into the deeper philosophical underpinnings of art and aesthetics within the era of generative AI.
It brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, “The Human Condition,” where she delineates human activities into labor, work, and motion. Arendt categorizes “work” as creating durable objects that contribute to the human-made world – a world where AI can now contribute.
Arendt’s philosophy prompts us to query whether creations devoid of human intentionality and lived experience can truly embody the depth and richness that outline artistic expression. The controversy surrounding Midjourney’s appropriation of artist styles without consent mirrors her concerns concerning the value and authenticity of art within the age of AI reproduction.
Worry about generative AI’s erosion of human creativity echoes within the works of other post-modernist thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and, more recently, Neil Postman, whose “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” critiques the uncontrolled growth of technology, suggesting that it undermines critical considering, reduces complex cultural practices to mere transactions, and erodes the foundations of social institutions.
Along these lines, Arendt said of the industrially modernized age, “All the values characteristic of the world of fabrication – permanence, stability, durability…are sacrificed in favor of the values of life, productivity, and abundance.”
As Professor Roger Berkowitz, writing for the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, explained, “We labor by necessity; we work to create a human reality.”
It’s an ironic coincidence, as AI has often been marketed as doing the alternative: automating hard labor so humans can deal with their more personal and artistic pursuits.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even said he was mistaken about this, confessing that he didn’t imagine AI would seize creative workflows so effectively.
“Creativity has been easier for AI than people thought,” Altman said on the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference in October 2023.
Of course, there may be the counter-view that AI is about to enhance the human experience and transcend what it means to be human – something that conjures each eutopic dreams and dystopian nightmares.
Much as tools like word processors and Adobe suites enhanced workflows vs. fully replacing writers and designers, the considering is that AI can address drudgery without usurping truly human ideation skills anytime soon.
To give a good hearing to those that aren’t so sympathetic to AI-related job losses, humanity has witnessed similar transitions that challenged the essence of creativity and its mediums.
Take the music industry, for instance, when sampling and electronic music production democratized music creation. Critics blasted the sampling process (and still do), but it surely developed genres of music we now take with no consideration.
Then there was the CD, the MP3 player, and so forth and so forth. Vinyl is stronger than 20 years ago, and tape cassettes are making a comeback.
You just can’t kill types of tangible creative work. At least not permanently. Creativity is antifragile. AI is one other test, a minimum of in a philosophical sense, for all that won’t ease the fears of those facing job losses.
There can be the potential for AI to unleash a brand new creative order by concentrating even greater effort, appreciation, and value in authentic human work.
As electronic and ambient music pioneer Brian Eno famously described, “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty a couple of recent medium will certainly change into its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of those shall be cherished and emulated as soon as they might be avoided.”
“It’s the sound of failure: a lot modern art is the sound of things going uncontrolled, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart.”
Will generative AI follow this pattern? Possibly, but artists are still right to be skeptical. They’re taking matters into their very own hands and using tools just like the University of Chicago’s Nightshade to ‘poison’ AI models from the within.
Might we see the formation of some type of anarcho-primitive movement consisting of newly converted Luddites who’ve lost their jobs – more – their life’s work and meaning – to generative AI?
History tells us that creativity overcomes seemingly immovable objects. It’s evolved despite the harshest realities modern humans have faced over our 100,000-year history.
AI might eventually create a brand new history, but creativity stays under human control, for now a minimum of.
