Technology 6 min read By Arthur Ellington
Richard Florida Says AI Will Reshape Creative Class, Not Destroy It
The urbanist who coined the term «creative class» pushes back on claims that AI is wiping out creative work, arguing it will make judgement, taste and human skills more valuable while automating routine cognitive jobs.
Richard Florida, the urbanist who coined the term «creative class» more than two decades ago, has rejected claims that artificial intelligence is destroying creative work, arguing instead that the technology will make certain kinds of creative jobs more valuable even as it eliminates others.
His intervention follows a Fortune review of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that three creative sectors — film and sound recording, broadcasting and streaming, and newspaper, magazine and book publishing — shed roughly 189,000 jobs. Film and sound recording alone fell 27 per cent, losing 120,000 positions between August 2022 and August 2026. Broadcasting and content providers, which include streaming services, lost about 29,000 jobs, while publishers cut around 40,000 between 2022 and 2025.
Joseph Politano, who writes the economics newsletter Apricitas Economics, said the United States had lost more than 200,000 jobs in creative industries over four years, describing it as one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern American history, matched only during the 2001 and 2008 recessions. Because there is no broad recession this time, he noted the losses coincide with the rise of AI tools capable of producing novels, images and music at very low cost, and asked whether this represents «the fall of the creative class».
Florida, who joined Vanderbilt University this autumn to lead its work on the future of cities, disputed the scale of the numbers but not the disruption. «I don’t think it’s going to eliminate those jobs. I think it’s going to make certain kinds of creative work more valuable,» he said. He divides work into three categories: manual work, cognitive work, and what he calls social, people, human and entrepreneurial skills. AI is automating the first two while making the third more valuable, and those social skills cluster in large cities.
«That’s why you’re seeing cities like New York and San Francisco become more important, not less,» he said, noting that the AI industry itself follows the same map, with companies based in San Francisco and their applications deployed in New York. He pointed to Brooklyn, Queens and increasingly the Bronx as among the few places in the world where the creative class and the service class live together. Remote work, he added, is turning London and New York into «global superstar hubs».
The damage is deepest in film and television production, where employment peaked at 289,100 in October 2022 and has since fallen by more than a third. In June, the broader film and sound recording sector fell to 322,300 jobs nationally, its lowest level since 1995 outside the pandemic. In Los Angeles, shoot days fell from 36,792 in 2022 to 19,694 in 2025, and about 41,000 film and TV workers left the industry between 2022 and 2024, with the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes driving part of that decline.
Yet employment in performing arts and spectator sports, which depends on people gathering in one place, grew by about 67,000 jobs over the same four years. Florida said this reflects AI giving cities the chance to do what they do best. He also revised one of his own early ideas, admitting he had «completely minimized the importance of entertainment and spectacle in downtowns». Downtowns now need sports teams and venues because «people are not going downtown to work; they have to go downtown for fun».
That growth is not reaching every gathering place. The US has lost one-fifth of its movie theatres and nearly one-third of its bowling alleys since 2001, as neighbourhood third places become too expensive both to operate and to visit while big-ticket venues draw crowds downtown. Florida linked this partly to AI itself. «AI is both an enhancing technology and eliminating technology,» he said. «We don’t know what the net will be, but the net’s better.»
He expects AI to hit entry-level creative work hardest, particularly «the grind-out jobs that people work till midnight in a consulting firm or in a financial firm, because AI can do that kind of stuff really efficiently». But he argued the technology changes roles rather than removing them. «It changes the role of an accountant or an engineer or an artist. It doesn’t eliminate that job. It makes that job different.»
The abilities that gain value, he said, are the defining traits of the creative class: «Judgement, taste, originality, imagination, asking the right questions, being able to mobilise people.» His conclusion is that AI will not kill the creative class but change it, shifting its centre of gravity towards human skills that machines cannot easily replicate.
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