What AI is actually doing to creative work
Most coverage of this is either panic or a sales pitch. This desk does something narrower and duller: it records what working creative professionals publicly say about their own employment, every day, and pairs it with a process-level breakdown of which parts of each job a model genuinely absorbs — written by someone who builds the agents, not by someone selling them.
Method: 5,141 working creative professionals who publish their availability in their own public profile are re-read once a day; changes are recorded as events. Baseline 2026-08-07, 89 days of history so far. Percentages describe this cohort, not the profession as a whole. Nothing here is backfilled, because the source only exposes the present.
Careers with a written breakdown
Commercial Illustration
Illustrators who sell work directly — commissions, book and editorial jobs, merch — rather than through a studio payroll.
Character Design
Designing characters that have to survive being drawn again — for games, TTRPGs, animation, and other people’s pipelines.
Concept Art
The pre-production role that got named as ground zero for AI displacement — and the one where the cohort shows the most people between jobs.
Animation & Storyboarding
Board artists, revisionists and 2D animators — a contract-to-contract profession where the gap between shows is the whole story.
Measured, not yet written up
These are in the daily snapshot but have no analysis behind them yet. Listed rather than hidden so the difference between “we measure this” and “we have a view on this” stays visible.
Comics & Manga
Comic artists, cartoonists, webcomic and manga creators.
735 tracked3D & VFX
Modelers, texture artists, compositors, riggers, technical artists.
654 trackedGame Art
Pixel artists, game artists, and art-side indie developers.
429 trackedGraphic & Brand Design
Brand, logo, type and book-cover designers; art directors.
325 trackedVideo Editing & Motion
Editors and motion designers. Note: this profession barely lives on Bluesky — the cohort numbers here are thin by construction, and the real conversation is on Reddit.
228 tracked · thin sampleVoice Acting
Voice actors and VO artists.
220 tracked · thin sampleFreelance Writing
Copywriters, screenwriters, ghostwriters, freelance journalists.
65 tracked · thin sampleIndependent Artists (unspecialised)
Working artists whose bio states a practice but not a job title. The largest single group in the cohort.
1,152 tracked