One of the first sentences I’ve been paid to write before, “Try lighter colored lipsticks, like peach or coral.” » Fresh out of college in the mid-2010s, I had landed a copy job for an explanatory website. One of the first tasks was to develop an article titled “How to Get Rid of Dark Lips.” Over the next two years, I worked on articles with titles such as “How to Speak Like a Stereotypical New Yorker (with Examples),” “How to Eat a Bug or Arachnid,” and “How to Acquire a Gun License in New Jersey.” I didn’t become rich or win literary awards, but I learned how to write a clear sentence, convey information in a logical sequence, and modulate my tone for the intended audience—skills I use daily in my current work in screenwriting, film editing, and corporate communications. Just as importantly, this job paid my bills while I found my way in the entertainment industry.
Artificial intelligence has made my first job obsolete. Today, if you want to learn “How to Become a Hip Hop Music Producer”, you can simply ask ChatGPT. AI is also replacing humans who do many of my later tasks: writing promotional copy for tourism boards, writing questions for low-budget documentaries, offering script notes on student films. Today, a quick search for writing jobs on LinkedIn has a number of positions that involve not producing copy, but training AI models to appear more human. When anyone can create a logo or marketing copy with the press of a button, why hire a new grad to do it?
These changes in the job market will not deter everyone. Well-connected young people from wealthy families can still afford to network and take unpaid jobs. But by eliminating entry-level jobs, AI could destroy the learning scale needed for artist development, and it could leave behind a culture driven by nepo babies and chatbots.
The existential crisis is spreading across the creative landscape. Last year, consultancy CVL Economics estimated that artificial intelligence would disrupt more than 200,000 jobs in the US entertainment industry by 2026. The CEO of an AI music generation company claimed in January, that most musicians don’t really enjoy making music and that musicians themselves will soon no longer be needed.
In a high-profile South by Southwest conference earlier this year, Phil Wiser, Paramount’s chief technology officer, described how AI could streamline every step of making a movie. Even director James Cameron, whose classic work The terminator warned of the dangers of intelligent machines, and whose next Avatar the rest will be would have include a disclaimer that no AI was involved in the making of the film – talked about using technology to reduce costs and speed up production schedules. Last year, OpenAI’s chief technology officer declared that “some creative jobs may disappear, but maybe they shouldn’t have existed in the first place.”
One of the big promises of generative AI is that it will free artists from drudgery, allowing them to focus on the kind of “real art” they all aspire to make. It might not work next time Magnoliabut it will go very well with the 500th episode of Law and order. What’s the harmstudio executives might wonder, what if machines took over work that seems simple and entrusted to competent professionals?
The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are more than just a job. It is by working according to established formulas and routines that young artists develop their skills. Hunter S. Thompson began his writing career as a copier for Time review; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; director David Lean edited newsreels; musician Lou Reed wrote bootleg pop tunes for department stores; filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and Francis Ford Coppola made cheap B movies for Roger Corman. Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and mentorship avenues that side hustles like waiting tables and bartending don’t.
Having begun my own transition into filmmaking by making rough edits of video footage for a YouTube channel, I couldn’t help but be alarmed when the creators of AI software Eddie rolled out an update in September that can produce early film edits. For this YouTube channel, I shot, edited and posted three videos per week, and received rigorous notes from the producer and almost immediate feedback from the audience. You can’t help but get better at your craft this way. These jobs are also meeting places: one of the producers of this channel then ordered my first script from me for Netflix.
There’s a reason the Writers Guild of America, of which I’m a member, made on-set mentoring opportunities for lower-level writers a part of its negotiations during the 2023 strike. The WGA won on that, but it may have been too late.
The optimistic case for AI, new artistic tools will give rise to new art forms, just like the invention of the camera created the art of photography and pushes painters to explore less realistic forms. The proliferation of inexpensive digital video cameras has contributed bring in the explosion of independent cinema in the late 1990s. I used several AI tools in ways that greatly expanded my capabilities as a film editor.
Working from their bedrooms, independent filmmakers can deploy what, until recently, were top-tier visual effects capabilities. Musicians can add AI instruments to their compositions. Maybe AI models will give everyone unlimited access artistic freedom without requiring in-depth technical knowledge. Tech companies tend to rave about the democratizing potential of their products, and AI technology can indeed offer huge rewards to savvy and lucky artists who make the most of it.
Yet past experience with social media and music streaming suggests a different progression: like other promising digital democratization technologies, generative AI may be better positioned to enrich the companies that develop it than to help independent creatives make a living.
In an ideal world, eliminating entry-level work would save aspiring writers from having to write “How to Become a Porn Star” to pay their rent, allowing true creativity to flourish in its place. For now, however, AI appears destined to diminish the livelihoods of creative professionals who spend decades mastering a craft. The leaders of Silicon Valley and Hollywood do not seem to understand that the culture of art also requires the culture of artists.