Yeah for sure. Mostly indirectly. I know a few people in my line of work who lost jobs because the client decided to just use AI to generate something.

I’ve also seen a number of examples of publications using AI images for editorial pieces which absolutely used to be paying jobs. For example this Atlantic article on Alex Jones. An actual person would have been paid to do a piece like this before AI came around.

And also there was the San Francisco ballet that did a bunch of their Nutcracker promo campaign art with AI stuff last year. They had traditionally used artists and photographers for years to do key pieces for their promo materials.

And as far as I am personally concerned, I’ve seen a marked slump in the volume of work inquiries I’ve been getting in the last year. I’ve been fortunate enough to remain fully booked and in the past just had to turn down a lot of work, but right now I’m getting about half as many inbound inquiries as I would have even a year ago. Hard to pin that on any one thing but I am sure AI is a factor. I’d be lying if I said that there haven’t been a number of my jobs over the years that couldn’t have been done with one of these AI models and a little trial and error.

I’ve also had a few clients now send me Midjourney stuff and basically want me to replicate it but make it work for whatever thing it was they were needing artwork for. So right there, that’s all the fun problem solving and artistic exploration out the window and it’s basically a case of “fix the robot’s thing.” It’s pretty depressing.

I’d be mostly fine with the robots doing away with all of our jobs if it meant we were heading into some post-work utopia where we got to just spend time doing the things that really matter to us, but that’s almost definitely not where this is going. All the windfalls will go to the top, the jobs will be less interesting, and wages will be depressed.