This is not a very substantial analysis of the industry and I'd be interested in a more comprehensive diagnosis. I believe there are coincidental factors in ind

This is not a very substantial analysis of the industry and I'd be interested in a more comprehensive diagnosis. I believe there are coincidental factors in industries that typically employ illustrators and other artists that are affecting the market that are not AI, namely the market conditions since late 2022. To give the games industry as an example, the industry grew unnaturally during Covid, everyone thought that trend would continue and there was a lot of money and hiring thrown into it. The industry is returning to the normal trend line and it's still highly profitable, but layoffs are happening because executives are not hitting financial forecasts. Similarly, marketing budgets have been slashed across industries as the economy slowed down, and design work dried up in tech because nobody is raising money except the people who think they can replace creative labor with AI. One thing that I'm not seeing in this thread is the reputational risk of using AI, especially in artistic works like games. AI imagery is generic, lazy, and is seeing a backlash from the public. It's a negative quality marker even if it's trendy in tech spaces. There's definitely a lot of people in executive leadership and management who think they can replace all kinds of labor with AI right now, but from what I've seen, that has not played out as expected in the real workforce. The actual reason this guy is losing half his business is probably more due to people cutting back on discretionary spending more than AI taking jobs.