Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI (www.bloodinthemachine.com)

After ChatGPT’s late‑2022 debut ignited a generative‑AI boom, companies quickly repackaged models as enterprise tools and clients discovered they could cheaply produce “good enough” images for internal and low‑stakes uses. Visual artists, illustrators, costume designers and graphic designers report steep drops in gigs and pay as Midjourney, OpenAI, Anthropic and tools like Adobe Firefly generate bespoke art trained on scraped illustrations and photos—often without the creators’ consent. The result is not just lost income but eroded career pathways, teaching demand and even artists’ sense of purpose; the reporting collects numerous first‑hand accounts ranging from vanished ad‑agency storyboarding work to community‑theater costume jobs replaced by impossible‑to‑construct AI designs, and in some cases severe emotional distress. Technically, these models excel for aesthetic, non‑accuracy‑critical tasks because outputs are cheap and fast, even if derivative and legally unprotectable (current policy and law generally do not grant copyright to purely AI‑generated works). That “good enough” threshold lets corporations substitute human craft with automated slop, depressing wages and shifting labor demand away from skilled image makers. The episode echoes Luddite‑era dynamics: technology hasn’t outcompeted human capability so much as been used to produce lower‑cost, lower‑quality substitutes that undercut skilled workers—raising urgent questions about training data consent, labor protections, and how to value creative labor in an AI‑driven marketplace.