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Oliver Fiegel, a 47-year-old photographer based in Munich, was reading a German national Sunday newspaper recently when he saw a front-page image that looked strangely off. The image showed a boy chasing a football on a pitch. But some of the wildflowers on the grass floated without stems. Half the goal net was missing. The boy’s hands were misshapen.
In previous years, many of Fiegel’s photography clients had been newspapers and magazines. But that work has dried up recently. This image, he felt, showed one reason why: “generative illustration”, the supplied caption said.
Fiegel was frustrated: the use of artificial intelligence instead of a human creative symbolised how his craft, on which he had spent years training, was being undermined and erased by the advent of generative AI tools that were cheaper and quicker, he felt, though often with worse results.
“AI’s had the most devastating effect on the industry,” said Fiegel, one of dozens of people who have revealed to the Observer how the rise of generative AI tools is changing their working life – for the better or worse – amid seismic economic shifts. “It’s happening very fast.”
Fiegel, who has been a photographer for about 18 years, said he could no longer make a living and had been forced to radically diversify his income streams. Now he is considering opening a natural wine bar instead.
For advanced economies such as the UK, Germany and the US, about 60% of jobs are exposed to AI, an International Monetary Fund study concluded last year, with approximately half of them potentially negatively affected. In the UK alone, AI could displace up to 3m private sector jobs, according to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, although some job losses may be offset by new roles in a changed economy.
“I only know a couple of photographers who still can live off this trade,” said Fiegel. “It’s not easy – I’ve identified as a creative my whole life.”
Since 1994, Karl Kerner has worked as a translator – between English, German and Norwegian – focusing on nonfiction scientific texts. This kind of translation, he said, required specialist knowledge and careful terminology.
“I am now basically out of business,” said Kerner. “This AI has come like a tsunami.” Amid the surge in AI-driven translation and editing tools in the past few years, “the number of [work] requests just dwindled”, he added.
The loss of his identity has had a huge impact, said Kerner, who was born in New York and now lives in Tønsberg, Norway. “Overnight, all this linguistic culture stuff is just worthless, really. It does something to you, because that’s who you were professionally. [It’s like] somebody takes the rug from under you.”
Kerner, 64, has begun working for an agriculture consultancy. “It’s not a good age to be on the job market – it wasn’t easy,” he said.
But technology is also helping him with the few translation jobs he still gets. Instead of translating word by word, he can feed a text into automated translation software, then use his knowledge to weed out inaccuracies and mistranslations, drastically reducing labour time. “I’m not a technophobe – I find it fascinating,” he said.
Other workers have had a more positive experience as they integrate AI into their daily work.
Alexander Calvey, a self-employed locum GP in Surrey, said using an AI scribe to write up his notes had saved him time and improved their quality. The results mean that he is able to “focus more on the patient than the notes”.
Calvey, who also works for a private GP provider, added that he had managed to increase the number of patients he sees, in some cases from four to five an hour. In future, as the technology improves, Calvey feels, AI will have further uses for guiding questioning and treatment.
The ChatGPT chatbot has become a sounding board for Paul, a 44-year-old university researcher on mathematics and philosophy based in Stockholm. He said the tool was helpful for summarising literature and brainstorming research questions.
“It knows a little about a lot – it knows other things people have done that I have no clue about,” allowing him to research those topics in greater depth, he said.
But professional work isn’t the only thing Paul uses ChatGPT for. He also uses it for personal tasks, such as offering him an analysis if he experiences a strange dream.
Despite this functionality, he is worried about the amount of information that companies controlling generative AI tools learn about their users. He said he was “very concerned” about “the power of a few corporate tech giants”.
The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, meanwhile, has said he wants AI to be “mainlined into the veins” of the nation to boost productivity and economic growth. But this month, the TUC has called for urgent government action to protect workers in creative industries amid disruption and job loss risks.
For Jenny Turner, a 33-year-old freelance illustrator in north-east England, the drop in demand for commissions has been “very sudden” and coincided with the proliferation of AI image tools. Turner previously sold work through Etsy. She would charge, for instance, about £100 for a coloured, pencil-drawn portrait. But over the last couple of years, she began to see AI-generated images below her work in the “You may also like” section, with some prices below £10.
“I can no longer compete … it’s sold at a price I could never drop to,” she said. “It’s hit me really hard, made me feel sort of empty, like you’ve kind of wasted everything – it’s just upsetting, and it makes you angry.”
Turner said, after drawing since childhood and studying at art college then university, she had now delisted her illustrations on Etsy and had been forced to consider other lines of work. “If that happens in everything,” she said, “how many people are not going to have jobs?”