Counting The Human Cost Of Ai In The Creative Industries And Asking Whats Next

Creative Boom: Insight Creative Industry Counting the cost of AI: what's next, and where does it all end? Lost clients, stolen work, eroded skills and a generation that may never learn to think for itself. The costs are real and mounting. So where does this all end? Written By: Tom May 20 April 2026 Image licensed via Alamy The conversation about AI and creativity tends to get stuck in the abstract. Will it replace us? Will it liberate us? Will the quality of creative work go up or down?

These are reasonable questions, but they can obscure something more immediate and more personal: the costs that are already being paid, right now, by real people doing real creative work. These costs are not hypothetical. They are showing up in lost commissions, in creative skills left to atrophy, and in audiences who feel cheated. But once you've counted the cost, the harder question remains: where does this go from here? We spoke to four professionals to find out what they're seeing, what they're worried about, and what they think comes next.

Disappearing clients For Jason Roberts, designer and illustrator at Victory Over All, the impact of generative AI isn't a future risk; it's already arrived. "I've recently had two clients switch to generative AI for their illustrations and marketing material," he states. "In both cases, it was simply to cut out the cost of paying a creative." What makes this hard to dismiss is the candour of some at the top of the tree. "When an OpenAI CTO says 'Some creative jobs will go away, but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place', we should question whether AI is actually here to help creatives, or replace them," argues Jason.

"And when Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei predicts AI will wipe out white-collar jobs, their visions of replacing human workers become pretty clear." Jason is sceptical of the idea that AI itself is neutral, and that any harm comes only from how it's used. "That's similar to the burden of carbon footprint being pushed onto individuals, rather than onto the oil companies and governments," he counters.

"In my view, the negative impacts of AI should be the responsibility of AI companies." A debt that never gets paid Designer and illustrator Carole Chevalier has been working in the industry for almost 15 years, and she's concerned about one thing above all else: the models were built on work that wasn't offered freely. In her view, generative AI simply "gives an answer to a prompt, vomiting a mix of stolen art to create something that has no soul. It's ethically completely wrong to me, and terrible for the environment on top of that.

People seem to forget where all the parts for the server farms are coming from, not to mention the energy it needs to function." Carole also points out that AI-generated work can erode trust and demean the effort of those who pursue genuine craft. She points to recent videos that present as stop-motion animation, but on closer inspection seem to have been made with AI. "People in the stop-motion industry pour their heart and soul into creating stop-motion video," she says. "So seeing fake ones that took hardly any time to create, and more importantly, required no animation skills, is heartbreaking.

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The article addresses the significant implications of AI on the creative industries, which is a pressing issue for brand strategy professionals, while also introducing the need for brands to adapt their strategies to highlight human creativity.