Predictions that AI will wipe out white-collar work have almost become routine. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said most professional work could be automated within 18 months. Ford CEO Jim Farley said AI will replace half of all white-collar workers, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spent much of 2025 warning that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs, before softening that talking point this spring.
That’s particularly anxiety-inducing for some creative workers, who have perhaps spent a good portion of their college and young adult lives explaining to their parents that, yes, they would be pursuing what they were pursuing, and yes, there would be a job in that field. A Fortune review of BLS data found three creative sectors (film and sound recording, broadcasting and streaming, and newspaper, magazine, and book publishing) lost roughly 189,000 jobs. Film and sound recording alone fell 27%, by 120,000 jobs between August 2022 and August 2026. Broadcasting and content providers, which include streaming services, lost about 29,000 while publishers shed about 40,000 between 2022 and 2025.
This week, Joseph Politano, who writes the economics newsletter Apricitas Economics, said the country lost more than 200,000 jobs in creative industries over the past four years. He calls it one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern U.S. history, matched only during the 2001 and 2008 recessions. But because there’s no broad recession this time around, he instead notes the losses coincide with the rise of AI tools that can produce novels, images, and music at very low cost, and asks whether this is “the fall of the creative class.”
For the man who coined “the creative class,” not so.
“I’m not sure his numbers are right,” Richard Florida, the urbanist who coined the term in his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, told Fortune. “But I don’t think it’s going to eliminate those jobs. I think it’s going to make certain kinds of creative work more valuable.”
Downtown is for the people
The damage is deepest in film and TV production, where employment peaked at 289,100 in October 2022 and has since fallen by more than a third, according to the BLS. In June, the broader film and sound recording sector fell to 322,300 jobs nationally, its lowest level since 1995 aside from the pandemic. In Los Angeles, shoot days fell from 36,792 in 2022 to 19,694 in 2025, and about 41,000 film and TV workers left the industry between 2022 and 2024, (the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes drove part of that decline).
Despite this, employment in performing arts and spectator sports, which depends on people gathering in one place, grew by about 67,000 jobs over the same four years.
Florida says he believes it’s because AI gives cities the chance to do what cities do best. He divides work into three types: manual work, cognitive work, and what he called “social skills, people skills, human skills, entrepreneurial skills.” AI is automating the first two while making the third more valuable. Social skills, he said, cluster in big cities.
“That’s why you’re seeing cities like New York and San Francisco become more important, not less,” Florida said. The AI industry follows the same map: “They’re based in San Francisco. Their application occurs in New York.”
New York’s mix of neighborhoods is part of his case. “Brooklyn and Queens and maybe the Bronx now are some of the few places in the world where the creative class and the service class live together,” Florida said.
Florida, who joined Vanderbilt University this fall to lead its work on the future of cities, said remote work was turning London and New York into “global superstar hubs.” Meanwhile, Hollywood was the other side of that argument: Los Angeles is losing one of the world’s great industry clusters as production scatters.
Florida also revised one of his own early ideas. “I thought that cities could be just Jane Jacobs’ kind of live-work cute neighborhoods,” he said of the famed activist who encouraged people to build community by working, playing, eating, and spending in their neighborhoods. “I completely minimized the importance of entertainment and spectacle in downtowns.” Downtowns now need sports teams and venues because “people are not going downtown to work; they have to go downtown for fun.”
AI will give cities new life
The growth in live events is not reaching every kind of gathering place. The U.S. lost one-fifth of its movie theaters and nearly one-third of its bowling alleys since 2001. These neighborhood third places are becoming too expensive both to operate and to visit, while big-ticket venues draw crowds downtown. That, in turn, is driving away the very community Jacobs advocated for: People are talking to each other less, going out and having fun less, spending more time at home, and as a result, are as unhappy as ever.
Florida said that’s partially due to AI itself. “AI is both an enhancing technology and eliminating technology,” he said. “We don’t know what the net will be, but the net’s better.”
AI will hit parts of the creative class hard, Florida said, especially entry-level work built on brute mental effort: “the grind-out jobs that people work till midnight in a consulting firm or in a financial firm, because AI can do that kind of stuff really efficiently.”
“It changes the role of an accountant or an engineer or an artist. It doesn’t eliminate that job. It makes that job different,” he said. The abilities that gain value are traits of the creative class. “Judgment, taste, originality, imagination, asking the right questions, being able to mobilize people.”
“I don’t think it’ll kill the creative class,” Florida said. “It’ll change the creative class, but in many ways, it’ll also liberate the creative class.”
