As the video games industry continues to face massive layoffs, narrative jobs are taking the biggest hit. The industry's job cuts over the past couple of years--more than 30,000 roles were eliminated in 2023 and 2024--disproportionately affected narrative designers, the creative professionals who craft the story elements of the game and give a title its emotional punch. Even the director of the game Avowed, Carrie Patel--a successful author and narrative developer with over a decade of experience at the game studio Obsidian Entertainment--feels lucky she was able to start her career years ago. She can't imagine trying to break into the industry under today's conditions. "It just seems to be harder and harder to find a path in," Patel says. "I've heard colleagues hired within the last three or five years say essentially the same thing."

It was early morning and Walks With Moon hard the faint rhythm of the drums far off in the distance. He stood still and cocked an ear, listening intently. When he understood the meaning, he ran to the area his tribe was making home, looking for the elders. He told them that he'd heard the drums, that the first message for a PowWow had started. They gathered their drums, headed out of the camp and moved to a small clearing closer in distance to where Walks With Moon had heard the message and they began to reply with their own message. So what does this have to do with Artificial Intelligence?

Until now, technology has come for the lower-paid, repetitive jobs, hollowing out workforces and prospects for a vast segment of the population, and creating political polarization. With AI, many fear, it will now be the turn of the professional classes—and not just authors, artists and composers—to feel the pain.

AI can beat humans at chess, power vacuum cleaners, and now it can even compose songs. This year's winner of the AI Song Contest, in which machine learning was used to create music, was recently announced. "Listen To Your Body Choir" was co-written with artificial intelligence and takes inspiration from the song "Daisy Bell," the first song to be sung by a computer in 1961. But is a computer program really capable of being creative? "The short answer, right now, is'no' or at least'not yet,'" Chirag Shah, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, told Lifewire in an email interview.