America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?

I liked this article. I appreciate that it didn't try to say it is or isn't AI. To me, the entertainment industry suffers from a lot of the same problems in most other industries that chase "efficiency", in terms of resources used and profit made. Economies and industries and labor are interdependent and more "alive" than balance sheets and bank accounts. For the film industry, when you start moving things away from LA to "save money", it has knock on effects that happen over long periods of time. Multiple Quarterly Earnings Reports long, if you will. Local businesses that depend on the film industry close due to less work, so then there is less expertise available. Less expertise means it can command high prices. Suddenly it's too expensive to film in LA altogether. So the rest of the jobs leave too. This pattern seems super common, not just in the film industry. It is a narrative that interweaves with AI, too. AI is supposedly an efficiency boom. In the macroeconomy, who is the "efficiency" we are chasing for, who benefits? Who is getting the money that was "saved"? Regular people do not have more more money or time. The "efficiency" is for people who are already very rich, to get richer. Is that worth the price we're paying? I know my answer. The article gets close to it by mentioning the consolidation in Hollywood, but I do not see how we fix this without enforcing our antitrust laws. It is embarrassing what we let rich people do in the name of stock price go up.

The quality of Hollywood movies has gone down substantially. I can barely watch anything on Netflix due to issues like this: "Matt Damon Says Netflix Wants Movies to Restate the ‘Plot Three or Four Times in the Dialogue’ Because Viewers are on ‘Their Phones While They’re Watching’" https://variety.com/2026/film/news/matt-damon-netflix-movies...

Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.

The real job losses are probably in commercial art. If you're making an illustration for an ad, that's almost certainly automated now. Looking at when the decline started, it's about when Stable Diffusion got going. Some of this stuff is pre-AI, Photoshop smart tools stuff. Especially clothing ads. Nobody has a live model pose with each item color any more. Or even each item. (I used to know actress/model/waitress types in LA who did that. Grind job: "OK, the blue sweater is next, and hurry it up, we have 50 to do before lunch". But it paid OK.)

No one has any money and entertainment is the first thing you cut. Every streaming service feels more and more user hostile. If I want to watch South Park it’s a 15$ a month subscription just for that . Paramount Plus has nothing else. I want to watch Lanterns, another 30$ a month. Maybe King of The Hill , 20$ a month. The Reboot has this weird lazy animation style.