Independent artists say that finding work in the era of AI "is a struggle".
AI has rippled through the creative industries, and two Berkshire-based artists — Luke Crump and Emi Giovanini, from Bracknell — have opened a month-long exhibition for people to see their art free of charge.
Which work disappeared
Giovanini said that before AI she would get a lot of commissions for logos and flyers, but that "since AI came all the people, especially with low budgets, try [using AI]" instead — taking work away from local creatives.
That detail is the whole economics of this, and it is worth drawing out. The work that went first was not the prestigious commission. It was the small, functional, low-budget job: a logo for a local business, a flyer for an event.
Those jobs are rarely anyone's portfolio highlight. They are what pays the rent between the bigger pieces, and they are the work a client is most willing to accept as "good enough". Remove them and the career does not become less glamorous — it becomes financially impossible, long before anyone's artistic reputation is touched.
What they say is left
Giovanini has had to find different ways to earn an income. But she is not fatalistic about it:
"AI will never take away things from us 100% because we are still people. We're still humans, and it's art made by humans."
She offered a concrete example of what does not transfer: "AI can't replicate someone creating a mirror, for example, which is something that we do a lot."
That is a sharper argument than it might first appear. A mirror is a made object — physical, one-off, finished by hand. The distinction she is drawing is not between human and machine creativity in the abstract; it is between work that is delivered as a file and work that is delivered as a thing.
Showing the work has its own costs
Exhibiting in the community matters to both artists, but it carries hidden costs: the rent for the venue, or the commission a venue charges on sales.
So the free exhibition is not free to put on. It is paid for out of the same income that the lost commissions used to supply.
The same pattern is visible here
Bangladesh has a large base of freelance designers working exactly this tier — logos, flyers, social media creatives, packaging mock-ups — for domestic small businesses and for overseas clients on Fiverr and Upwork.
That is the same category of work Giovanini describes losing, and the local market is more exposed, not less: price is the main thing competed on, so the client most likely to switch to a generated logo is the client most of these designers depend on.
The defensible ground is where she points: work that ends in a physical object, or work where the value is the judgement around the file rather than the file itself.
A free exhibition is a form of advertising
There is a quieter calculation in showing work for nothing. Artists who have lost the commissions that used to find them through word of mouth need another way to be seen, and a month in a public space is one of the few that does not run through a platform's recommendation system. It is also slower, smaller and harder to measure than posting online. That two working artists have chosen it anyway says something about how little the online route is currently returning for the tier of work they do.
