Creative class guru Richard Florida confronts 189k job wipeout: ‘AI is both an enhancing technology and eliminating technology’

AI doom talk has become a steady drumbeat, and this week the anxiety landed squarely on creative work. A Fortune review of BLS data found roughly 189,000 jobs disappeared across film and sound recording, broadcasting and streaming, and newspaper, magazine, and book publishing. Film and sound recording took the biggest hit, down 120,000 jobs between August 2022 and August 2026. Broadcasting and content providers shed about 29,000 jobs, while publishers lost about 40,000 between 2022 and 2025.

Joseph Politano of Apricitas Economics put the broader toll at more than 200,000 creative jobs over four years, calling it one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern U.S. history. He says it rhymes with the 2001 and 2008 recessions, except there isn’t a recession this time. The difference, in his view, is AI tools that can churn out novels, images, and music at very low cost.

Richard Florida is not buying the apocalypse framing. The urbanist who coined “the creative class” in his 2002 book says the numbers may be off, and the jobs are not disappearing so much as changing shape. AI, he said, will hit some work hard, but it will also make certain kinds of creative work more valuable. His split is blunt: manual work, cognitive work, and then social, human, and entrepreneurial work. AI is chewing through the first two, while the third gets rarer and more prized.

That logic helps explain why he keeps pointing back to cities. New York and San Francisco, he says, matter more, not less, because the people skills AI can’t fake still cluster there. He also argues that live events and spectacle are becoming more important downtown, while the old office-centered city is fading. In his telling, the future of urban life looks less like typing alone at a desk and more like gathering in person for work, fun, and whatever still requires a room full of people.

The clearest casualty is entry-level grind work, the kind built on brute mental effort. Florida thinks AI will hammer those jobs, then force the rest of the profession to lean harder on judgment, taste, originality, and the ability to mobilize people. That’s not a small change. But it’s also not the extinction event the panic merchants want.