My friend the illustrator was right about AI art stealing jobs

My buddy Mark who does freelance illustration in Portland told me back in February that AI art tools would kill entry level gigs first. I thought he was being dramatic, but then I lost three logo design contracts last month to clients who just used Midjourney instead. Has anyone else seen this happen with smaller projects or am I just unlucky?

3 comments

3 Comments

clark.robin24d ago

Honestly though, losing three contracts to Midjourney feels rough, but I think the bigger issue is that those clients probably weren't paying for your actual skill set in the first place. Logo design for small clients has always been a race to the bottom, so AI just sped up something that was already happening. Mark's right about entry level gigs, but he's missing the part where AI can't handle the nuanced stuff like brand strategy or custom illustration work that actually requires human judgment. Those clients who switched to Midjourney were probably always going to be the cheap ones who undervalue design.

blair_dixon23d ago

It's the same pattern everywhere, not just design. My friend runs a small bakery and now there's these AI-generated recipe blogs copying her sourdough formulas. @simons28 is onto something with that low cost package idea - basically creating a price floor so you're not competing with free. The cheap clients were always gonna be cheap, AI just made it obvious faster. Saw the same thing happen with stock photography back in the day, cameras got cheaper and suddenly everyone thought they were a photographer. The real work always survives because clients who actually care about the details will pay for someone who understands why those details matter.

simons2824d ago

@clark.robin brings up a good point about cheap clients, but I think there's a middle ground here. When I lost a few small projects to AI last spring, I started offering a "low cost" package that only covered the bare minimum - like a simple logo with no extra changes or vector files. That way I could keep the clients who just needed something quick and cheap, while still charging my normal rate for the ones who actually needed real design work. It worked well enough that I kept about half of those budget clients. The real trick was showing them examples of bad AI logos so they could see the difference in quality. I just tell them upfront that AI can't do the little things like kerning or color balance that make a logo hold up long term.