The warning does not come from a start-up or a trade union, but from UNESCO. In its latest report on the future of the creative economy, the organisation outlines a scenario that extends far beyond technological disruption. Generative AI and platform-driven markets, it argues, could lead to significant income declines for creative professionals by 2028 — not as a temporary shock, but as a structural shift.
According to UNESCO’s modelling, two groups stand to be particularly affected: music creators and audiovisual professionals. Composers, songwriters and producers face the prospect of losing roughly a quarter of their income on average, while filmmakers, screenwriters, editors and animators could see their earnings fall by around one fifth. The issue is not the existence of AI itself, but its economic impact. By drastically lowering production costs, generative tools multiply the supply of content.
What appears as democratisation in creative production produces market pressure in practice. When content can be generated at scale, individual works lose scarcity. At the same time, platform dynamics reinforce this trend. Recommendation algorithms tend to privilege globally scalable hits, concentrating visibility while pushing long-tail creators further to the margins. Income becomes increasingly tied to algorithmic distribution — governed by systems whose inner workings remain largely opaque to those who depend on them.
A deeper shift is also underway in revenue structures. Digital income now accounts for a substantial share of creative earnings and has grown rapidly in recent years. Yet these revenues are largely mediated through platforms with opaque remuneration models and short contractual cycles. Public cultural funding, meanwhile, remains relatively modest worldwide, increasing the sector’s reliance on digital markets.
Another fault line lies in training data. Many creators see echoes of their work in generative systems without clear licensing or compensation. Whether — and on what terms — creative works can be used to train AI remains only partially resolved in legal and policy frameworks, with tangible economic consequences.
UNESCO therefore frames the challenge as a potential structural crisis for human creativity. Not because AI replaces creativity outright, but because it reshapes the conditions under which creative work is valued and monetised. Attention, licensing fees and income streams may shift in ways that undermine traditional livelihood models.
In response, the organisation issues a policy call. It advocates new consent and remuneration mechanisms where creative works are used in training datasets, alongside greater transparency around the sources of such data and labelling requirements for AI-generated content. Certification systems that distinguish human-created works are also proposed as a means of sustaining market differentiation.
More broadly, UNESCO calls for updated collective remuneration frameworks that reflect AI use and platform distribution, as well as stronger oversight of digital platforms in areas such as discoverability and fair participation. The cultural and creative sectors, it argues, must be integrated into national AI strategies — something that currently occurs only rarely.
Seen in this light, the report functions less as a narrow forecast than as a policy wake-up call. Technological innovation does not merely introduce new tools; it reorganises the systems through which value is created. For creative professionals, the pressing question is no longer whether AI will shape their work, but under what conditions their work will continue to sustain them economically.
