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在过去四年中，美国在“创造”工业中失去了200余个就业机会，仅在去年一年中就损失了约50 000个就业机会。 这也是美国现代历史上媒体就业最糟糕的时期之一，类似的失业强度和持续时间仅在2001年和2008年重大经济衰退期间出现。 然而，今天并没有普遍衰退，这段失业时期恰逢AI系统崛起，这些系统可以编织批发小说、摄影现实主义图像、类似声音的音乐，以及几乎每一种其他形式的数字艺术，以极其低廉的成本大量出现。 这是创意课的落幕吗？
证明人工智能驱动的艺术领域失业的确切数量是极其困难的。 媒体公司对其AI的使用十分担心，既是为了防止公众的反弹，也是为了维护其版权的法律基础，在经济上更为重要。 AI的影响也很难与目前影响艺术企业的其他因素脱钩，例如好莱坞的合并，内容制作的离岸外包，或者传统媒体提供者继续被转移到社会媒体创作者手中。 然而，也许AI影响最明显的证据就是数字艺术行业的所有分部门都在失去工作，而当面娱乐却在健康地增长。
一些数字失业只是以往趋势的延续，例如出版业的技术变革几十年来一直在磨碎报纸和杂志的工作。 然而，对于直播、流媒体或图形设计等部门来说，与前几年的平静相比，最近的经验是不寻常的下滑。 接下来是最受打击的部门，电影和录音
好莱坞从未见过像过去四年那样糟糕，电影和电视业损失了100多份工作，几乎占该部门总数的三分之一。 今年夏天，就业总人数比2008年衰退以来的任何时候都低，接近30年来的最低点。 流传时代已经证明是一个极其困难的过渡，传统电影和TV 显示失去观看时间给用户生成，并越来越多地得到AI协助或AI生成的内容流。
近半数媒体在过去四年中失业，书面出版是失业的次大来源，在同一时间段内就业人数减少了70k以上。 但任何特定媒体都未能控制失业，它们也没有显示任何减弱的迹象，损失每年持续徘徊在50k左右，近几个月甚至加速。 AI的进一步发展是否会继续使创意行业的工人流离失所？
艺术商业模特能活下来吗？
了解人工智能兴起后艺术事业会发生什么
这是千年的转折，Metallica遇到了一个问题。 他们即将到来的未释放的音轨在电台和互联网上爆出，他们在那里发现成千上万的用户共享了数千个文件，其中许多是直接撕裂的专辑，以15美元的价格被免费提供。 最期待的专辑甚至在放在商店货架上之前也经常在网上泄露。 Metallica起诉Napster侵犯版权，他们很快与其他著名艺术家分别提起诉讼，并最终成为美国唱片业协会(RIAA).
许多大众对Metallica毫无同情心，被认为是一帮已经成功的百万富翁，试图向听众赌更多钱，但两人轻易胜诉，迫使纳普斯特破产。 然而，Metallica在法律上也许是正确的，但却在技术方面走错了一边；RIAA赢得了这场战斗，但正在输掉这场战争。
现代的互联网让文件共享变得非常容易，无论多少鲸鱼公司扮演的角色，他们都不可能捕捉到每一个非法上传。 海盗的长期威胁损害了他们的版权，限制了他们收取音乐费的能力。 最终，单曲的价值跌落到Spotify和Apple Music等公司可以冲进来获取大量目录，整合，并收取比较微不足道的上网费。 一张金属专辑在2000年会花多少钱？
音乐行业从未回到CD高峰时期的繁忙发薪日，这对消费者来说是一个巨大的好处，但也是一种对音乐家的挤压，迫使他们随着时间推移而从根本上改变他们的商业模式。 音乐本身并非仅仅为了直接赚钱而出售唱片，而是日益成为现场音乐会(和Merch)的亏损广告，这些音乐会提供了艺术家收入越来越大的份额。 巡回演出时间更长，地点更大，票价暴涨，音乐家经常扮演的角色比孤立的艺术家更接近公共影响者。 如果不是因为音乐会销量不断上升，音乐的商业模式就会彻底崩溃，而音乐家的收入就会崩溃。
当然，在向流水时代的过渡中，仍然存在着重大的倒退。 乐队(尤其是较小的乐队)抱怨永无止境的压力，要求永远在巡演中。 音乐家的音乐内容适合家听失去了那些更适合大型节日。 甚至算上音乐会的收入，音乐家赚的钱也比以前少。 然而，音乐家们比娱乐分部门的许多领域表现得更好，因为有一个活的部件可以恢复——对于许多媒体行业来说，数字时代没有留下这样的舒适感。
随着时间推移，录像业务向音乐的相反方向发展——走出剧院并进入家中。 好莱坞以前曾用大部分钱诱导客户参观已售出电影院，但这些电影院逐渐被广播电视，有线电视，实体媒体取代。 然而，由于每次成功的技术飞跃都增加了整个视频观看时间，该行业仍然能够在技术动荡中蓬勃发展。 也就是说，直到现代流水时代。
今天，过多的视频选择和社交媒体的兴起，使得视频制作人陷入了一场争取有限关注的恶性竞争。 即使在根据通货膨胀进行调整之前，电影票销量去年结束，比2019年的峰值下降了25%，有线电视收入比其峰值下降了18%，溪流收入也未能弥补跌幅。 在YouTube、Twitch、TikTok或社交媒体上免费用户生成内容的山峰，影视媒体的商业模式在根本上受到挤压，与音乐行业不同，好莱坞的现场演唱会基本上没有可以用来缓解痛苦的等效。
在人工智能革命中，创意工作者的实际最坏情况与互联网出现后出版业发生的情况类似，即基本商业模式几乎完全崩溃。 报纸曾经在美国雇用了大约50万人，比整个石油工业都多，现在他们的薪水已经下降近85%，仍在下降。 自90年代以来，杂志出版商同样让66%的工作人员离开，而图书出版商损失了40%。
以前成立的报纸的面包和面包的日常信息更新都是拆散的 -- -- 分数转到体育网站，股票流向金融网站，预测流向气象网站 -- -- 每亏一亏，都会影响消费者购买报纸的需要。 报纸的广告收入迅速流向Google等公司。 社交媒体用户集体在突破任何新闻报道方面变得比日报所希望的要快。 网路让民众轻而易举地把文章内容复制，整个商业模式已经崩溃，以至于现在只有少数主要报纸能够生存。
在AI时代，这种版权稀释和强制拆分的规模是媒体企业最糟糕的情况。 透过消费者对AI所生成内容的强烈厌恶，整个艺术、娱乐和娱乐部门约有32%的工人在一定程度上使用Generative AI，低于所有行业的62%的平均水平，但仍足以使几乎所有主要媒体项目都能在其工作流程中拥有一些AI。
事实上，AI可能以大公司本身难以阻止的方式渗入媒体的制作过程，即使他们想——电视工作室怎么能确定他们的编剧室里没有人在为笑话咨询ChatGPT，或者任何故事板艺术家正在产生概念艺术呢？即使专业的电视和电影制片厂能有效地抵制诱惑，防止内部AI的使用，他们还能与大量想要成为独立创作者的人竞争多久，而烦恼要少得多？许多媒体企业试图抵制2010年代的算法内容浪潮，因此被埋没。
结论
然而，从本质上讲，很难真正预测新技术将如何与现有的艺术企业互动。 4年来图书销量出现意外回升这部小说作为商业艺术形式已经挣扎了几十年，2019年的书籍销量比千年初要少，但最近六年的销量出现了前所未有的70%的猛增。 印刷词不太可能的救世主可能来自其对立的极地-TikTok。
当然，现在阅读的人数比以往少了，对于一般公众来说，短式的视频应用加速了阅读的迁移，就像电视、电子游戏或社交媒体一样。 然而，对于数量不断减少的敬业的重复读者来说，“书呆子”成为了源头评论、分析、言论和社区的一种新方式，它促进了阅读经验和绝对充电的书籍销售。 AI工具可能以今天无法预料的方式，给其他博物馆、音乐会或其他艺术形式带来完全无法预测的外溢效果
归根结底，艺术只是总体宏观经济的一小部分。 媒体即使在最高峰时也只占劳动力市场的一小部分，在创意产业中一直很难受雇到p.
本文由 AI图鉴自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
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America has lost more than 200k jobs in “creative” industries over the last four years, with roughly 50k lost within the last year alone. That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history, with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008. Yet there’s no generalized recession today—instead, this period of job loss coincides with the rise of AI systems that can compose wholesale novels, photorealistic images, soundalike music, and practically every other form of digital art, en masse and at extremely low costs. Is this the fall of the Creative Class?
Proving the exact amount of AI-driven job loss in the arts is extremely difficult. Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights. The effects of AI are also hard to disentangle from other factors currently affecting arts businesses, like consolidation in Hollywood, offshoring of content production, or the continued displacement of traditional media providers in favor of social media creators. Yet perhaps the clearest evidence of AI’s influence is just that all subsectors of the digital arts industry are losing jobs, while in-person entertainment is still growing at a healthy pace.
Some of those digital job losses are just a continuation of prior trends, like in the publishing industry where technological change has been continually grinding away newspaper and magazine jobs for decades. Yet for sectors like live broadcasting, streaming, or graphic design, recent experience is an unusual downturn compared to the tranquility of years prior. Then there’s the worst-hit sector, movie & sound recording, which has been bleeding jobs at a nearly unprecedented pace over the last three years.
Hollywood has never seen a stretch as bad as the last four years, with the movie & TV industry losing more than 100k jobs, nearly one-third of the sector’s total. At the depths touched this summer, total employment was lower than at any point since the 2008 recession and approaching the lowest point in 30 years. The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.
Overall, nearly half the media job losses of the last four years have been concentrated in the movie & sound recording sector that includes Hollywood. Written publishing has been the next-largest source of job loss, with employment down by more than 70k over the same time frame. Yet the job losses have by no means been contained to any particular part of media; instead they’ve hit nearly every subsector at some point. Nor do they show any sign of abating, with losses consistently hovering at around 50k per year and even accelerating in recent months. Will further AI development continue displacing workers in creative industries?
Can the Arts Business Model Survive?
To understand what could happen to the business of art amidst the rise of AI, it’s important to understand what did happen to it during the first digital transition, the rise of the internet.
It was the turn of the millennium, and Metallica had a problem. Demos of their upcoming, unreleased tracks were bouncing around radio and the internet, originally leaked onto a new internet file-sharing website called Napster. There they found thousands of files shared amongst hundreds of thousands of users, many of which were direct rips of albums that sold for $15 being offered for free. The most anticipated albums were often leaked online even before they were on store shelves. Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringement, and they were soon joined by separate suits from other prominent artists and eventually the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Much of the general public was understandably unsympathetic to Metallica, perceived as a bunch of already-successful millionaires trying to bilk even more money from listeners, and were even less sympathetic towards the RIAA, perceived as scurrilous middlemen who take from artists and fans alike. But the two of them easily won their lawsuit, forcing Napster into bankruptcy. Yet Metallica may have been right on the law but were on the wrong side of technology; the RIAA had won the battle but was losing the war.
The modern internet made file-sharing extremely easy, and no matter how much whac-a-mole companies played, they could not possibly catch every illegal upload. The perennial threat of piracy undermined their copyright and limited their ability to charge for music. Eventually, the value of individual songs fell to the point that companies like Spotify and Apple Music could swoop in to acquire massive catalogues, consolidate them, and charge a comparatively trivial fee for access. For what a single Metallica album would have cost in 2000, you can now get a month’s worth of unlimited access to nearly all human-made music.
The music industry has never returned to the heyday paydays of the peak CD era—even without adjusting for inflation, streaming revenue pales in comparison to ‘90s physical media sales. This was a massive boon to consumers, but it was also a squeeze on musicians that forced them to fundamentally change their business model over time. Instead of just selling records to earn money directly, music itself increasingly became a loss-leading advertisement for the live concerts (and merch) that provided a growing share of artists’ income. Tours got longer, venues got bigger, ticket prices skyrocketed, and musicians frequently took on roles closer to public influencers than isolated artistes. Were it not for rising concert sales, the business model of music would have completely collapsed, and the income going to musicians would have cratered.
Of course, there were still significant downsides to the transition into the streaming era. Bands (especially smaller ones) complain about the unending pressure to always be on tour. Musicians whose content was suited to home listening lost out to those more suited to giant festivals. Even accounting for concert revenues, musicians made less money than before. Yet musicians fared better than many areas of entertainment subsectors because there was a live component to fall back on—for many media industries, the digital era left no such comfort.
Over time, the business of video has moved in the opposite direction of music—out of the theatre and into the home. Hollywood formerly made most of its money enticing customers to visit sold-out movie theatres, but these were gradually supplanted by broadcast TV, cable, and physical media. Yet because each successful technological leap increased total video watch time, the industry was still able to thrive amidst technological upheaval. That is, until the modern streaming era.
Today, the plethora of video options and the rise of social media have sent video producers into a vicious competition for limited attention. Even before adjusting for inflation, movie ticket sales ended last year down 25% from their 2019 peak, cable revenue is down 18% from its peak, and streaming revenue has not been able to compensate for the drop. The mountain of free user-generated content on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or social media was already presenting harsh competition for traditional video companies in the years before ChatGPT’s launch, and now streaming services are also competing with a flood of AI-generated content. The business model of video media is fundamentally getting squeezed, and unlike in the music industry, there’s basically no equivalent to live concerts that Hollywood can be used to ease the pain.
The actual worst-case scenario for creative workers amidst the AI revolution is something similar to what happened to the publishing industry after the advent of the internet—that is, near-total collapse of their fundamental business model. Newspapers used to employ roughly half a million people in the US, more than the entire oil industry, and now their payrolls are down nearly 85% and still dropping. Magazine publishers likewise have let 66% of their staff go since the 90s, while book publishers have lost 40%.
The routine informational updates that previously formed newspapers’ bread-and-butter were all de-bundled—box scores moved to sports websites, stock movements went to financial websites, forecasts went to weather websites—each loss compounding on itself to undermine consumers’ need to buy the paper. Search engines became the first place people looked to for information, and newspapers’ advertising revenue rapidly started flowing to companies like Google instead. The collective of social media users became faster at breaking any news story than a daily paper could ever hope to be. When papers eventually did start aggressively paywalling content, the internet made it trivially easy for people to just copy the articles’ content and share it beyond the paywall. The entire business model had collapsed, to the point that now only a select few major newspapers can even survive.
That scale of copyright dilution and forced unbundling is the worst-case scenario for media businesses in the age of AI. It’s possible arts jobs could survive via consumers’ deep-seated aversion to explicitly AI-generated content, but AI is increasingly being used throughout media in ways invisible to the average end consumer. Roughly 32% of workers in the overall arts, entertainment, and recreation sector use Generative AI to some extent, which is less than the 62% average across all industries, but still enough that virtually every major media project could have some AI within its workflow.
Indeed, AI is likely seeping into media production processes in ways large companies themselves would struggle to prevent even when they desire to—how can a TV studio be sure nobody in their writers’ room is consulting ChatGPT for jokes or any storyboard artist is generating concept art? And even if professional TV and movie studios do effectively hold out against temptation and prevent internal AI use, how long can they compete with the large mass of wannabe independent creators with much fewer scruples? Plenty of media businesses tried to hold out against the algorithmic content waves of the 2010s and were buried as a result.
Conclusions
Yet fundamentally, it’s difficult to meaningfully predict how new technologies will interact with existing arts businesses. Take the unexpected resurgence in book sales over the last four years. The novel as a commercial art form had been struggling for decades, with fewer books sold in 2019 than at the beginning of the millennium, but the last six years have seen an unprecedented 70% surge in sales. The unlikely savior of the printed word came from perhaps its polar opposite—TikTok.
Of course, fewer people read now than ever before—for the general public, short-form video apps have accelerated the displacement of reading, just as TV, video games, or social media before them. Yet for a dwindling number of dedicated repeat readers, “BookTok” became a new way to source reviews, analysis, discourse, and community in a way that boosted the reading experience and absolutely turbocharged book sales. It’s possible that AI tools could have those same totally unpredictable spillovers for other museums, concerts, or other forms of art in ways that are unpredictable today, in much the same way short-form video saved books in ways that could never have been anticipated beforehand.
At the end of the day, the arts are only a small sector of the overall macroeconomy. Media made up a small share of the labor market even at its peak, and it has always been difficult to get hired in creative industries to the p
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Atlas. All rights belong to the original author.