It’s a perilous moment for creative life in America. While supporting oneself as an artist has never been easy, the power of generative A.I. is pushing creative workers to confront an uncomfortable question: Is there a place for paid creative work within late capitalism? And what will happen to our cultural landscape if the answer turns out to be no?
As sociologists who study the relationship between technology and society, we’ve spent the last year posing questions to creative workers about A.I. We’ve talked to book authors, screenwriters, voice actors and visual artists. We’ve interviewed labor leaders, lawyers and technologists. Our takeaway from these conversations: What A.I. imperils is not human creativity itself but the ability to make a living from creative endeavor.
The threat is monumental but the outcome is not inevitable. The actions that artists, audiences and regulators take in the next few years will shape the future of the arts for a long time to come.
In a short span of time, A.I.-generated content has become ubiquitous. Prose written in A.I.’s unmistakably tedious style is pervasive, while in recent months, newer tools like Sora 2 and Suno have filled the internet with hit country songs and squishy mochi-ball cats.
The question that often surrounds the introduction of a generative A.I. model is whether or not it’s capable of producing art at a level that competes with humans. But the creative workers we spoke with were largely uninterested in this benchmark. If A.I. can produce work that’s comparable to that of humans, they felt, that’s only because it stole from them.
Karla Ortiz, an illustrator, painter and concept artist, described the moment she witnessed A.I. churning out art in her style. “It felt like a gut punch,” she said. “They were using my reputation, the work that I trained for decades, my whole life to do, and they were just using it to provide their clients with imagery that tries to mimic me.”
The proponents of A.I. often claim that, as good as it may get, the technology will never be able to match the talent and ingenuity of superlative human-made art. Amit Gupta is the co-founder of Sudowrite, an A.I. tool designed for writing. He believes that A.I. “will help us get to the 80 percent mark, maybe the 90 percent mark” of human writing quality, “but we’re still going to be able to discern that last bit.” Anyone with an iPhone can take a very good photo, Mr. Gupta has pointed out, but “there are still photographs that hang in museums; they’re not the photographs that you and I took.”
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, similarly talked about how A.I. will eventually replace the “median human” in most fields, but not the top performers. However, there’s a problem with this line of reasoning: Sui generis artistic prodigies are few and far between. Artists, like most people trying to do something hard, tend to get better with lots of practice. Someone who is, to borrow Mr. Altman’s phrase, a “median” writer in their 20s might turn into a great one by their 40s by putting in ample time and work.
The creative grunt work that A.I. stands to replace most quickly is what helps emerging artists improve, not to mention pay their bills. In the early years of her career, Ms. Ortiz supported herself coloring comics and making art for video game companies. Coming from a lower-middle-class background in Puerto Rico, Ms. Ortiz said, she “would have not been able to live as an artist had I not had those jobs that a lot of folks today can’t find” because the would-be employers use A.I. instead. If an A.I. colors comics, takes notes in the TV writers’ room, and sifts through the slush pile at a publishing house, how will young creative workers master their medium — and scrape together a living while doing so?
This is not a novel phenomenon; the starving artist is a cliché for a reason. Creative and cultural labor markets have long been beset by an imbalance between supply and demand: There are more people who want to write, paint, direct, act and play music than there are paying jobs doing those things. As a result, most artists aren’t paid especially well for their most creatively fulfilling work. Historically, this has advantaged those with the connections to score, say, a coveted unpaid internship at an art gallery or a film studio — and the independent wealth to pay for food and rent while completing it.
A.I. did not create these inequalities. But it may well exacerbate them if the technology eliminates the kind of entry-level jobs that allow early-career artists to make connections and a living, however meager, in artistic fields. Indeed, there is a prevailing fear that A.I. will be used as a pretext to eliminate jobs even if its outputs are unimpressive. When generative A.I. is put into actual practice, “its functionality is so limited and so disappointing and so mediocre,” said Larry J. Cohen, a TV writer who serves on the A.I. task force for the Writers Guild of America East. But because A.I. is surrounded by what Mr. Cohen called “a complete reality distortion field,” its mediocrity may not actually matter. Studios may use A.I. anyway because they are too nervous to miss the bandwagon.
There’s a scholarly term for this: institutional isomorphism. In a 1983 paper, the sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell confronted an apparent puzzle: Why do organizations in a field so often resemble one another in structure, practices and products, even when it might be advantageous to differentiate themselves? Mr. DiMaggio and Mr. Powell argued that when organizations are operating in an environment of uncertainty, especially one in which “technologies are poorly understood,” they look to see what other organizations are doing and copy them. The result of this mimicry is that over time, certain modes of operation become taken for granted as the correct and legitimate ones within an organization, even if they do little to advance its aims.
Given that generative A.I. certainly qualifies as a “poorly understood” technology, we shouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of isomorphic process unfolding within media industries. In contract negotiations for W.G.A.E. unions, the guild’s executive director, Sam Wheeler, has seen media companies resist demands for A.I.-related worker protections with a stubbornness usually reserved for dollars-and-cents issues, such as employee health care costs. Companies dug their heels in about A.I. even when they seemed to have no concrete ideas about how they would actually use it. Mr. Wheeler has been struck by how “the lack of a plan” has been coupled with “the certainty that one will present itself.” And when that plan eventually emerges, the last thing executives will want is to be hamstrung by union rules.
While contending with media companies that seem hellbent on deploying A.I., guilds and unions are also trying to educate audiences about the differences between human and A.I.-generated works, in the hope that they will place a higher value on human-created art and have an easier time finding it. For example, the Authors Guild has pioneered a “Human Authored” certification, which writers can obtain by attesting that their book has at most minimal use of A.I.
A certification like this is premised on the notion — or perhaps just the fervent hope — that audiences will spurn machine-generated art in favor of its human-made counterpart. But Simon Rich, an author, screenwriter and playwright isn’t so sure. “There will always be people who see art more as a form of communication and who make art and enjoy art because they crave that spiritual connection with another human soul,” he said — similar to the way that some people will pay a premium for free-range organic eggs or shoes that were handcrafted in Italy. Yet he questions how many of those people there are. Will they be sufficient to support even a midsize industry? Mr. Rich sees a possible future where what we now think of as human-made “mainstream art” — novels, TV, film, popular music — will become like ballet or opera: “It’s still beloved, but it really needs to rely on philanthropy to continue to exist.”
Faced with this bleak prospect, many creative workers are seeking out ways to A.I.-proof their careers. Several of the writers we spoke with talked about prioritizing projects that incorporate live performance, like plays and stand-up comedy, or forms of writing that are deeply personal and based on their own experiences, because these are harder to automate. Some visual artists are experimenting with technological tools like Glaze, an app that helps protect their pieces from being mimicked by A.I.
Beyond these individual actions, there are also emerging collective efforts to safeguard artists’ livelihoods. The best known of these are the 2023 Hollywood strikes, in which the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild secured a number of A.I.-related protections for actors and film and TV writers. The resulting contracts stipulate that studios cannot make digital replicas of actors without their consent, nor can they force writers to use A.I. in crafting a movie script or teleplay. Then there are the lawsuits: Ms. Ortiz is a plaintiff in one of dozens of ongoing lawsuits accusing A.I. companies of copyright infringement — one of which was recently settled by Anthropic to the tune of $1.5 billion.
Artists who are involved in these lawsuits are sometimes painted as anti-tech, but most of the creative workers we’ve spoken to are not altogether opposed to A.I. Several of them named some mundane aspect of their daily work they’d be happy to offload to the technology. For Eden Riegel Miller, an actor who does frequent voice work for video games, it was “call-outs” — generic multipurpose exclamations and short phrases that can be used in multiple scenes in the game (think of a character in a first-person shooter yelling “On your left” or “Going in!”). Miller sometimes finds recording call-outs “mind-numbing,” not to mention vocally taxing. She wondered if there might be a role to play for A.I. here: “I bet there are a lot of actors that are like, ‘Oh, can the computer scream for me? Then I can go do this other session, and my voice won’t hurt? Great!’”
Other artists already use A.I. to save time and energy. Recently, while working on the script for what he described as an “animated family action comedy,” Mr. Rich had drafted the line, “the C.I.A. wouldn’t approve the plan because it requires 10,000 megatons of nuclear power.” He wasn’t satisfied with this — he wanted the line to sound more authentic to nuclear science. So he clicked over to ChatGPT, which he always keeps open now when writing, and prompted it to provide different terminology. ChatGPT suggested “10 exawatts of sustained nuclear fusion,” which Mr. Rich loved — into the draft it went. He estimates that the tool saves him about two hours a day that he used to spend looking stuff up online.
In theory, it’s a win-win: Mr. Rich gets more time to write, and his fans get more of his screenplays, TV scripts, short stories and humor pieces. But this sunny scenario only works if writers like Mr. Rich can continue making a living from their work — and if there’s a labor market that allows the next Simon Rich or Eden Riegel Miller to hone their craft. If A.I. continues on its current trajectory, this is precisely what’s at risk.
Most artists are not seeking to eliminate A.I. altogether, but instead to claim agency over the way it’s trained and used. Next year key flash points will emerge in that effort, as SAG-AFTRA and the W.G.A. negotiate new contracts with Hollywood studios and streaming companies, and several A.I.-related copyright lawsuits are likely to be decided. For many of the artists we’ve spoken to, there’s a sense of now or never: It is this moment, before A.I. and its uses are taken for granted, when they have the best shot of securing a future for paid creative work.
It would be naïve to think creative workers are playing on anything resembling a level field here, given the jaw-dropping sums being invested in A.I. and the extent to which tech giants have already transformed cultural production. The A.I. industry claims that it wants to democratize creativity, but the real goal is dominance. It can seem inevitable that A.I. will rewrite the future of the arts — a natural consequence of the tools’ technical and economic momentum. But the impacts of technological change are always shaped by human action. If we believe and behave as though A.I. dominance is a foregone conclusion, we risk making it so. Instead, we should support the creative workers who are fighting for a different outcome — and have already landed a few punches.
The future of human creativity is inextricably linked to the future of creative labor. The sooner we recognize this, the better chance we have to preserve artists’ livelihoods — and human-made art itself. Let’s not decide the fight is over simply because the odds are long.
Caitlin Petre is an associate professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
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