The impact of AI on jobs is indeed slowly starting to happen. At my company before, we had a long-term contract with a video creator whose content I really liked.

Basically, for promotional videos and the like, I handled the coordination with him. For each video, he would charge several thousand out there; for us, it was a flat $1,000. After AI came out, our company didn’t contact him anymore—we shifted to me doing it myself. What I produce is definitely not as good as his, but the cost is only $100.

AI allows many clients to stop paying high costs for their impulsive ideas. They don’t need a deliverable worth 100 points; 85 points is enough. AI can’t make it 100 points either, but the costs have dropped a lot.

I also remember a project sponsor in the industry—an extremely wealthy real-estate business owner. In 2024, he reached out to collaborate with me to build an NFT–RWA project. The result was that designing the NFT cost several tens of thousands, and he still wasn’t satisfied.... He spent a lot of time making changes and revising it many times. In the end, the boss felt the project couldn’t be launched anyway, so they just dropped it.

It can’t be denied that often, a lot of the demand is just a flash of inspiration—an impulsive moment. For the client, they were already fired up and ready to do a big push, but now AI helps you roll it out immediately—and you find this doesn’t work and that doesn’t work. In the end, they give up. They save money.

So for ordinary people, there are two main options: compete in design, compete as programmers—these two are the original high-paying roles.