A Mid-Year Report on AI, Jobs, and the Cultural Economies

What AI is really doing to cultural labour, and the entire economy we all rely on to make it matter.

The Absorption Gap

By now, the headlines blur together:

Claude 3.5 outperforms junior devs. GPT-4o does vision and voice. Agents run longer. Costs crash. YC is 70% AI-native. Sora previews look like trailers. Hugging Face is overflowing.

It’s impressive. It’s relentless. It’s kind of exhausting.

If you work in media, entertainment, gaming, arts, or culture,…