One of the first sentences I was ever paid to write was “Try out lighter lip stick colors, like peach or coral.” Fresh out of college in the mid 2010s, I’d scored a copy job for a how-to website. An early task involved expanding upon an article titled “How to Get Rid of Dark Lips.” For the next two years, I worked on articles with headlines such as “How to Speak Like a Stereotypical New Yorker (With Examples),” “How to Eat an Insect or Arachnid,” and “How to Acquire a Gun License in New Jersey.” I didn’t get rich or win literary awards, but I did learn how to write a clean sentence, convey information in a logical sequence, and modulate my tone for the intended audience—skills that I use daily in my current work in screenwriting, film editing, and corporate communications. Just as important, the job paid my bills while I found my way in the entertainment industry. Artificial intelligence has rendered my first job obsolete. Today, if you want to learn  “How to Become a Hip Hop Music Producer,” you can just ask ChatGPT. AI is also displacing the humans doing many of my subsequent jobs: writing promotional copy for tourism boards, drafting questions for low-budget documentaries, offering script notes on student films. Today, a cursory search for writing jobs on LinkedIn pulls up a number of positions that involve not producing copy but training AI models to sound more human. When anyone can create a logo or marketing copy at the touch of a button, why hire a new graduate to do it? [From the July/August 2023 issue: The coming humanist renaissance] These shifts in the job market won’t deter everyone. Well-connected young people with rich families can always afford to network and take unpaid jobs. But by eliminating entry-level jobs, AI may destroy the ladder of apprenticeship necessary to develop artists, and it could leave behind a culture driven by nepo babies and chatbots.   The existential crisis is spreading across the creative landscape. Last year, the consulting firm CVL Economics estimated that artificial intelligence would disrupt more than 200,000 entertainment-industry jobs in the United States by 2026. The CEO of an AI music-generation company claimed in January that most musicians don’t actually enjoy making music, and that musicians themselves will soon be unnecessary. In a much-touted South by Southwest talk earlier this year, Phil Wiser, the chief technology officer of Paramount, described how AI could streamline every step of filmmaking. Even the director James Cameron—whose classic work The Terminator warned of the dangers of intelligent machines, and whose forthcoming Avatar sequel will reportedly include a disclaimer that no AI was involved in making the film—has talked about using the technology to cut costs and speed up production schedules. Last year, the chief technology officer of OpenAI declared that “some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” One great promise of generative AI is that it will free artists from drudgery, allowing them to focus on the sort of “real art” they all long to do. It may not cut together the next Magnolia, but it’ll do just fine with the 500th episode of Law & Order. What’s the harm, studio executives might wonder, if machines take over work that seems unchallenging and rote to knowledgeable professionals? [Read: Your creativity won’t save your job from AI] The problem is that entry-level creative jobs are much more than grunt work. Working within established formulas and routines is how young artists develop their skills. Hunter S. Thompson began his writing career as a copy boy for Time magazine; Joan Didion was a research assistant at Vogue; the director David Lean edited newsreels; the musician Lou Reed wrote knockoff pop tunes for department stores; the filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola shot cheap B movies for Roger Corman. Beyond the money, which is usually modest, low-level creative jobs offer practice time and pathways for mentorship that side gigs such as waiting tables and tending bar do not. Having begun my own transition into filmmaking by making rough cuts of video footage for a YouTube channel, I couldn’t help but be alarmed when the makers of the AI software Eddie launched an update in September that can produce first edits of films. For that YouTube channel, I shot, edited, and published three videos a week, and I received rigorous producer notes and near-immediate audience feedback. You can’t help but get better at your craft that way. These jobs are also where you meet people: One of the producers at that channel later commissioned my first produced screenplay for Netflix. There’s a reason the Writers Guild of America, of which I am a member, made on-set mentorship opportunities for lower-level writers a plank of its negotiations during the 2023 strike. The WGA won on that point, but it may have been too late. The optimistic case for AI is that new artistic tools will yield new forms of art, much as the invention of the camera created the art of photography and pushed painters to explore less realistic forms. The proliferation of cheap digital video cameras helped usher in the indie-film explosion of the late 1990s. I’ve used several AI tools in ways that have widely expanded my capabilities as a film editor. Working from their bedrooms, indie filmmakers can deploy what, until recently, were top-tier visual-effects capabilities. Musicians can add AI instruments to their compositions. Perhaps AI models will offer everyone unlimited artistic freedom without requiring extensive technical knowledge. Tech companies tend to rhapsodize about the democratizing potential of their products, and AI technology may indeed offer huge rewards to the savvy and lucky artists who take maximum advantage of it. [Read: Here’s how AI will come for your job] Yet past experience from social media and streaming music suggests a different progression: Like other technologies that promise digital democratization, generative AI may be better poised to enrich the companies that develop it than to help freelance creatives make a living. In an ideal world, the elimination of entry-level work would free future writers from having to write “How to Be a Pornstar” in order to pay their rent, allowing true creativity to flourish in its place. At the moment, though, AI seems destined to squeeze the livelihoods of creative professionals who spend decades mastering a craft. Executives in Silicon Valley and Hollywood don’t seem to understand that the cultivation of art also requires the cultivation of artists.