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Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈@JosephPolitano · Sep 27, 2026

NEW from me: Over the last four years, America has lost more than 200k jobs in creative fields like publishing, film,…

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Summary

America has lost over 200,000 creative jobs in the past four years, with AI playing a significant role in digital arts sectors like graphic design and film/TV, while live arts remain relatively stable. Drawing parallels to how previous technologies disrupted creative industries, the thread explores whether arts business models can adapt or face unrecoverable decline like publishing did during the internet era.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

  1. #1

    NEW from me: Over the last four years, America has lost more than 200k jobs in creative fields like publishing, film, TV, or graphic design. It's the worst stretch for arts jobs outside of major recessions. How much is AI to blame? And can the arts' business model survive?🧵

  2. #2

    Perhaps the best evidence for AI-driven arts job loss is that all digital arts industries are losing jobs while most live arts still chug along Sectors like graphic design, streaming, & movie recording have experienced historically unusual job loss since ChatGPT's launch

  3. #3

    Hollywood has suffered the most in the AI era—with the movie & TV industry losing more than 100k jobs, nearly one-third of the sector’s total employment, over the last four years. Total employment in video production is approaching the lowest levels in 30 years

  4. #4

    Can the arts business model survive AI? Perhaps the best guide is to look at how the arts survived past tech revolutions Take music—internet piracy and then streaming killed the lucrative CD market, but musicians mostly saved their jobs by focusing much more on live concerts

  5. #5

    But arts businesses in the AI era might end up looking like the unrecoverable devastation of writing businesses in the internet era Social media caused a total collapse of publishers' business models, leading to an 85% drop in news & book employment that shows no sign of abating

  6. #6

    Still, it's extremely difficult to predict how tech will interact with arts businesses Take US novel sales, which had been declining for decades up to 2020. Would anyone have anticipated that short-form video apps like TikTok would reverse this trend and send book sales soaring?

  7. #7

    Overall, media has always been a small share of the economy—the effect of AI art will be primarily cultural & social rather than economic Still, current arts displacement is a microcosm of disruption already happening in places like tech, and maybe coming to larger sectors soon

  8. #8

    Thanks for making it to the end of the thread! If you want to read more, here’s the full article where I give more detailed data on AI & arts job loss While you’re there, consider subscribing to my newsletter where I write all about econ! apricitas.io/p/ai-and-the-f…