Over the past four years, the U.S. creative industries have shed more than 200,000 jobs, with approximately 50,000 lost in the last year alone, marking one of the steepest declines in media employment since the 2001 and 2008 recessions. While no broad economic recession is currently underway, this downturn aligns with the rapid advancement of AI systems capable of generating novels, images, music, and other digital content at scale and low cost. The movie and sound recording sector has been hit hardest, losing over 100,000 jobs—nearly a third of its workforce—since 2020, with employment reaching a 30-year low this summer. Written publishing follows, with over 70,000 positions eliminated. Unlike previous technological shifts, such as the internet’s disruption of the music industry—which led to a pivot toward live performances and tours—many digital art sectors lack a comparable fallback. Hollywood, for instance, faces declining box office revenues, reduced cable subscriptions, and increased competition from user-generated and AI-assisted content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. While AI adoption varies, roughly 32% of workers in arts, entertainment, and recreation report using generative AI tools, often undetectably integrated into workflows. Despite these challenges, some sectors have found unexpected resilience; for example, book sales surged by 70% over six years, driven partly by TikTok’s BookTok community. However, the broader impact of AI remains concentrated in narrow creative fields, with limited spillover into the wider economy thus far. Still, investor expectations suggest potential for expanded disruption, particularly in white-collar sectors like tech, where job losses have begun to emerge.