US creative industries have lost more than 200,000 jobs over the past four years, with about 50,000 disappearing in the last year alone. Economic analyst Joseph Politano said in his Apricitas Economics newsletter that AI is the leading suspect behind the decline, while also acknowledging that the case is difficult to prove directly.
Politano compiled data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, defining creative industries to include film, newspapers, magazines, books, radio, streaming, graphic design, performing arts, and museums. He said losses of this scale have appeared in modern times only during the 2001 and 2008 downturns, yet the broader economy is not currently in a generalized recession. Over the same period, AI tools have become capable of producing novels, images, and music at scale and at low cost.
Why the AI effect is hard to isolate
Politano said media companies have been reluctant to speak openly about how they use AI. He wrote that they fear public backlash and also risk undermining the copyright foundations of their own work. At the same time, AI is only one part of a larger mix that includes Hollywood consolidation, production moving overseas, and social-media creators pulling audiences away from traditional media.
Where the losses are showing up
In Politano’s view, the clearest signal is that digital creative subsectors are broadly losing jobs while live entertainment is still expanding.
Using January 2023, after ChatGPT’s debut, as the starting point and tracking through mid-2026, employment in film and sound recording fell about 21%. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishing also dropped about 21%. Graphic design declined about 12%, radio and television fell about 11%, and streaming and social media slipped about 2%. Museums, by contrast, grew about 14%, while performing arts rose about 13%.
He said publishing reflects a decline that has been building for decades. Radio, streaming, and graphic design had been relatively stable in earlier years but have turned down more recently. Film and sound recording have been hit the hardest, losing jobs over the past three years at a pace he described as close to unprecedented. Those losses account for nearly half of all media job cuts over the past four years. The annual pace, around 50,000 jobs, has not eased and has accelerated in recent months.
Why music held up better than Hollywood
Politano contrasted music with film and television. Around 2000, Metallica and the Recording Industry Association of America separately sued file-sharing service Napster for copyright infringement. They won in court, and Napster eventually went bankrupt. Piracy, though, did not disappear. The value of individual songs kept falling until services such as Spotify and Apple Music offered low-cost access to massive catalogs. A Metallica album once cost about $15. Now that amount is roughly enough for a month of subscription access to an enormous share of recorded music.
The trade-off, he wrote, is that the music business never returned to the economics of the CD era. Even without adjusting for inflation, streaming revenue still trails physical-record revenue from the 1990s. Music has increasingly become a loss leader for concerts and merchandise, while ticket prices have surged. Politano wrote that without live shows, the music business model would already have collapsed. That live fallback matters.
Film and television do not have the same cushion. As viewing moved from theaters into living rooms, each technological shift increased total viewing time, allowing the business to keep growing into the streaming era. Now the numbers are weaker. Last year’s box office, without adjusting for inflation, was still 25% below the 2019 peak. Cable television revenue was 18% below its own peak. Streaming has not filled the gap. YouTube and TikTok had already been competing for audience attention with free content, and now screen-based media also faces competition from large volumes of AI-generated material. Hollywood does not have a concert-style live revenue stream to soften the blow.
Hollywood’s worst four-year stretch
Politano said Hollywood has never seen a four-year period this bad. Film and television have lost more than 100,000 jobs. Employment in movie and video production fell from about 290,000 at its peak in October 2022 to about 180,000 in May 2026, a drop of more than 30%. The low reached around mid-2026 was the weakest since the 2008 downturn and close to a 30-year low.
The bleakest case: newspapers
Politano argued that newspapers represent the worst-case scenario. US newspapers once employed about 500,000 people, more than the entire oil industry, and have now lost nearly 85% of those jobs. Magazine publishers have cut 66% of staff since the 1990s, while book publishing is down 40%.
He said the newspaper product was gradually broken apart. Sports scores, stock prices, and weather moved to specialized sites. Search engines became the first stop for information, and advertising revenue shifted to Google. Social platforms spread news faster than daily papers, and paywalls could not stop copying and sharing. Only a small number of major newspapers have remained resilient. In his view, that combination of diluted copyright and forced unbundling is the darkest media scenario in the AI era.
AI is entering workflows out of public view
Even if audiences react badly to obviously AI-made work, Politano said that may not save creative jobs because AI is entering production in ways viewers cannot easily see. About 32% of workers in arts, entertainment, and recreation use generative AI, below the 62% average across all industries, but still enough for AI to appear somewhere in the workflow of almost every large media project.
He posed a practical question: how can a film or TV company be sure nobody in a writers’ room is using ChatGPT to come up with jokes? And even if a studio can police that, how long can it compete with independent creators who have fewer reservations?
Spillover effects remain uncertain
Politano also cautioned that the spillover effects of new technology are hard to predict. Fiction had struggled for decades, yet sales rose 70% over the past six years because of the BookTok reading community on TikTok.
His broader conclusion was that AI art is likely to matter more for culture and society than for the macroeconomy, at least for now. Still, he said creative jobs may be a preview of what happens to other white-collar creative work. Outside media, he pointed to the technology sector as the clearest example: the industry added nearly 300,000 jobs in 2022, then began losing jobs every year after that, marking its longest downturn. Politano said coding agents are replacing engineers.
Beyond a few narrow industries, however, he said AI-driven job losses are still relatively limited. Unemployment is higher than it was four years ago, but remains below the average level of the 2010s. Law firms and engineering companies have continued hiring aggressively in recent years. Politano ended with a warning: if AI’s economic impact is truly large enough to justify the trillions of dollars investors have committed, the effects will spread outward from these sectors.
