Strength of current models on the capabilities this job's tasks require.
Task automation potential40/100
Task-level exposure, weighted by task importance. A component of the headline, not the headline itself.
Observed AI adoption0/100
Evidence that AI is actually being used for this work.
Labour-market signal64/100
Observed changes in postings, employment or earnings.
Evidence strength54/100
Quantity and source quality of the evidence behind the score.
3 evidence item(s) contribute. Calculated 19 hours ago. 12 Oct 2026 UTC.
Overview
Produces original artwork and illustration for commercial and artistic use. Style-matched generation competes directly with commissioned commercial illustration.
Employment
≈50,000
approx. BLS OES
Median wage
≈$60,000
approx. BLS OES
Tasks tracked
4
linked to this occupation
Employment and wage values are approximate reference figures from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme, stored with an approximation flag. Verify against the O*NET record and BLS before quoting them.
Core tasks only. Exposure describes how much of the task output current AI can produce or substantially assist - not whether the task disappears. Secondary shared-baseline edges are hidden until per-occupation curation is complete.
3 attributed item(s). Confidence reflects study design: randomised and production deployments score higher than platform observations, which score higher than projections.
capabilityincreasesconfidence 88/100 · magnitude 721 Aug 2024
FLUX.1 and subsequent open-weight diffusion models produce legible text and layout-consistent imagery, making them usable for marketing collateral rather than only concept art.
Raises the automation component for routine image production tasks. Brand-system design and art direction remain largely unaffected.
labor marketincreasesconfidence 74/100 · magnitude 627 Mar 2024
Using platform data from a large online labour market, the authors find that after ChatGPT's release, jobs more exposed to AI automation experienced a relative decline in the number of projects and in freelancer earnings compared with less-exposed jobs.
One of the few *observational labour-market outcome* studies. It is platform-specific, covers remote freelance work only, and cannot separate AI substitution from other demand shifts. Treated here as a genuine labour-market signal with medium confidence.
labor marketincreasesconfidence 72/100 · magnitude 667 Mar 2025
Studying a large stock-content platform around the integration of image-generation models, the authors find a decline in the number of active graphic designers and in their earnings, with effects concentrated in routine and less-distinctive work.
The most directly relevant observational study for visual design work. Platform-specific and limited to stock content rather than brand or agency work, which is why the graphic-designer score is not at the top of the index despite strong capability evidence.
Backcast series: recomputed at quarterly checkpoints using only the models and evidence published by each date.
Score · 23 points · 2021-01-01 to 2026-07-01
Reconstruction, not measurement. 14 observed daily snapshot(s) exist for this occupation; the earlier part of the curve is derived by applying the current methodology to the model releases and published evidence available at each past date.
Recent events
Signals affecting this occupation
Research published
▲ IMPACT 40
Internalizing Agent Experience into Diffusion Model Weights via On-Policy Context Distillation
arXiv:2610.07250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wrapping an image generation model in an agentic harness can effectively boost Text-to-Image task performance: the harness can leverage memory, skills, workflow orchestration, result verification, and iterative refinement to continually construct and revise prompts, thereby eliciting better images. These gains, however, remain external to the diffusion model and are realized only while the full harness runs. We propose Diffusion On-Policy Context Distillation (D-OPCD), which treats the agent-improved prompt as privileged context and distills the
Labor research/Confidence:74 · moderate/Verified by AIKillsWhat
Research published
▲ IMPACT 40
Keep It CALM: Analyzing the Limits of Global Unsafety in Text-to-Image Generation
arXiv:2610.02300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-free safeguards for text-to-image generation often rely on a reusable safety signal, such as an unsafe direction or global toxic subspace, applied broadly across prompts. We provide a controlled geometric analysis of this global-unsafety assumption and reveal a consistent coverage-selectivity trade-off: compact unsafe subspaces fail to cover heterogeneous unsafe semantics, whereas broader aggregation increasingly distorts safety-adjacent benign prompts. Motivated by this finding, we propose CALM (Counterfactual Adaptive Local Modulation)
Labor research/Confidence:74 · moderate/Verified by AIKillsWhat
Research published
▲ IMPACT 40
Traversing the Satisfaction-Diversity Frontier in Text-to-Image Diffusion
arXiv:2610.02372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image generation enables users to explore several images generated from the same prompt. For these generated images to be useful, each one must reflect the user's preferences, measured by a learned reward, and differ visually from the others to maintain diversity. Existing methods are limited: they either address reward and diversity separately or combine them in one aggregate score, enabling high diversity to offset low rewards. In this paper, we address these limitations by formulating generation as satisficing: every image (candidate)
Labor research/Confidence:74 · moderate/Verified by AIKillsWhat
Occupation score change
▼ IMPACT 90
graphic illustrator exposure decreased 9.0 points
AI Exposure Score moved from a previous calculation to 47/100 under methodology v1.0. 3 evidence item(s) contributed.
Verified signal/Confidence:55 · low/Verified by AIKillsWhat
Labour market update
▲ IMPACT 66
After image-generation adoption, fewer active graphic designers and lower earnings
Studying a large stock-content platform around the integration of image-generation models, the authors find a decline in the number of active graphic designers and in their earnings, with effects concentrated in routine and less-distinctive work.
Workforce data/Confidence:72 · moderate/Verified by AIKillsWhat
New capability
▲ IMPACT 72
Open-weight image models reached production-quality text rendering
FLUX.1 and subsequent open-weight diffusion models produce legible text and layout-consistent imagery, making them usable for marketing collateral rather than only concept art.
Verified signal/Confidence:88 · high/Verified by AIKillsWhat
Labour market update
▲ IMPACT 62
Automation-prone freelance work saw fewer projects and lower earnings after ChatGPT
Using platform data from a large online labour market, the authors find that after ChatGPT's release, jobs more exposed to AI automation experienced a relative decline in the number of projects and in freelancer earnings compared with less-exposed jobs.
Workforce data/Confidence:74 · moderate/Verified by AIKillsWhat