As AI eats into paid creative work, people are taking up the same skills — drawing, writing, crafts — on their own time, for no money, just to feel human

I’m not a psychologist, an economist, or a labor researcher. This is one writer noticing a pattern and reading around it. The figures below come from particular surveys and company reports, not from settled science or universal law, and a trend among one retailer’s shoppers or one country’s illustrators is not a rule about everyone.

A 2025 Association of Illustrators survey of 6,844 members found that 32.40% of respondents had already lost work to AI alternatives. The same survey put the average loss at £9,262 per affected artist. Forrester analyst Jay Pattisall has projected US ad agencies will shed 32,000 jobs, around 7.5% of the workforce, to AI by 2030. That’s the part of the story that isn’t comforting, and it’s where I want to start.

“Redundant” is too strong a word for what those numbers show. It’s contraction rather than erasure. But the direction is the thing people feel in their stomachs, and it’s the thing I feel too.

My read, as someone watching this from inside a writing trade rather than studying it, is that AI is speeding up how fast a skill or a role stops being needed. Millennials like me are caught in the awkward middle of that, mid-career, decades of work still ahead, and no real option but to keep adapting. That’s not a forecast, just where a lot of us seem to be standing.

The revival side, on evenings and weekends

Now the part that surprised me. While the paid creative appears to be shrinking, the unpaid version is booming. Michaels® 2026 Creativity Trend Report logged a 136% jump in searches for analog hobbies like knitting and journaling over six months, and an 86% year-over-year rise in guided craft-kit sales. That’s a retailer with skin in the game, so take the framing with the salt it deserves, but the appetite behind the numbers seems real enough.

It isn’t only a craft-store story. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 61% of US adults rated their hobbies and recreational activities as extremely or very important, and the sharpest rise in valuing them has been among younger adults, those 18 to 34. Michaels’ president Heather Bennett describes its shoppers as “moving past the passive scroll and seeking out the friction of a physical hobby.” That’s her word, friction, and it’s the word I keep coming back to. People aren’t reaching for the easy version. They’re reaching for the slow, fiddly, by-hand one.

Why the same skill flips meaning

This is where my own small experience earns its place. A few years back I taught myself leathercraft and ran it as a tiny side business, making wallets and belts. I still carry a wallet I made. It’s darkened and softened with years of use, and I like it more now than the day I finished it. The thing is, leatherwork was two activities living in one. There was the part a market would pay for, the clean stitch line, the finished object. And there was the part I did it for: the cutting, the smell of the hide, the slow stamping along the edge. It was the same craft, but the two reasons I did it had nothing to do with each other.

Automation is very good at the first part and indifferent to the second. I notice this in my own writing day. The gathering side, the knowledge work, has gotten much cheaper since AI arrived. What hasn’t gotten cheaper is the imaginative jump, the bit where you find the angle nobody handed you. That part is still mine, and still the only bit that feels like the actual work. The cheap-to-copy layer got eaten; the human layer didn’t.

So when a skill is on the market, the output is what gets paid for, and the output is exactly what a machine can now imitate. Take that same skill off the market and the meaning inverts. The output stops mattering, and the doing becomes the whole point. A wallet you can buy for ten dollars; a wallet you spent a wet Sunday making is something else entirely, and the difference has nothing to do with the wallet.

Making the unprofitable thing on purpose

Michaels’ Stacey Shively says crafting has become “one of the most natural alternatives to scrolling — something people turn to when they want to unwind, focus or give their minds a break.” Maybe that’s the quieter truth under all the trend reports. The value of making something was never only the thing you made. It was the hour you spent inside the making, the part that no market was really paying for anyway.

But here’s the harder question I can’t shake. If the market is right, and automation really is the cheap, correct way to make most things, then the hour spent by hand becomes a luxury, not a refuge. What happens when the wet Sunday at the workbench is something only the comfortable can afford to spend? When the unpaid hobby that keeps a person feeling human costs a day’s wages in lost overtime?

I’ll probably cut another piece of leather this weekend anyway. No order, no deadline. But I’m not sure “the market can’t take this from you” is the line I started out thinking it was. The market doesn’t need to take it. It just needs to price your time high enough that you stop spending it this way.