this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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As a hobby and experiment, sure.
As a well paid profession? It's getting more and more difficult. You must live under a rock if you missed all the articles about creative staff being replaced by AI.
Good luck turning your art hobby into a steady income.
At the end of the day, if you free someone from having to do their job, that ought to be a net positive for society - that's 40 hours a week (roughly) that society gets back as free time. Unfortunately, the person who lost that job now has to find a 40-hour job from somewhere else, and the extra productivity lines the pockets of some billionaire.
If that didn't happen, and instead the 40 hours a week, multiplied by a million people whose jobs got automated, were given back to society, that's 40 million hours society can choose to spend on creative pursuits - if they want. This has nothing to do with AI. When a new fully automated rail line is deployed, we're not worrying about all the kids who are dying to be train drivers are going to do when they grow up and all trains are driverless, but it's actually the exact same thing going on.
I'm not going to turn my art hobby into income, the same way as my music hobby, video gaming hobby, reading hobby, TV-watching and cooking hobbies are not going to turn into an income stream. I do them because I like them, and I'm not even good enough at any of them to make money off them, but that doesn't matter.
I agree with your general sentiment but I have to ask - why shouldn't a person be able to make a living wage off what they enjoy doing (such as art, music, etc.)? Why not?
That would be great in an ideal world, but there's just no reason to think that they should be able to because the two concepts are simply orthogonal. What you can make a living off is determined by what other people need and want (with the exception of farming), which is completely different from what you want to do. Fundamentally, no individual is going to pay you (or give you food, or whatever) in return for doing something that they don't value.
The only way to get away from that paradigm is UBI or something like it.
Would I prefer to live in a world where my shitty abilities in music, art and writing were enough to keep myself fed and clothed? Yes! But we don't and AI isn't changing that. If we want to move towards that it's economic changes we need to make.
Note that this is still true even if you a well-funded arts council that funds artists as a public good, because while you might not be a slave to what individuals or "the masses" want, you're still a slave to what the arts council is willing to fund - what it sees as a public good. And if people as a whole simply don't value some forms of art that much, there's a very limited extent to which public funding will make up for that. If that's too abstract, if my art passion is recording classical music arranged for the human butt, I'm going to struggle to sell that to ordinary people, as well as struggle to get a grant to fund my passion.
Fundamentally I think this question arises because there is a general sense that people ought to be able to make a living from art. But this has - except for very few people - never been the case, because lots of people enjoy making art, but society as a whole does not value it highly enough to support all those people in doing it.