Will AI Put Illustrators Out of Work?

By WonderBooks · Oct 15, 2026

Some illustrators are already losing commissions to image generation. What that number hides, and what a publisher that hired artists in 2016 does now.

The short answer is that some already have, and the honest longer answer is that most of what AI is now illustrating was never going to be commissioned from anyone. Both halves are true at once, and the argument only makes sense if you hold them together.

A quarter of illustrators say they have lost work already.

In 2024 the Society of Authors in the UK surveyed its members about generative AI. Roughly a quarter of the illustrators who answered said they had already lost work to it, and more than a third of translators said the same. Those are self-reported figures from people with reason to be worried, but they match what anyone who buys illustration has watched happen: the first commissions to go were the cheap, fast ones. A blog header. A spot illustration for a newsletter. The cover of a self-published novel that would once have paid a few hundred dollars.

The work that is holding up is the work where the picture is the product. A picture book is thirty-two pages of paintings that have to agree with each other and with the words, made by one hand with one point of view. That is still commissioned, still paid by the project, and still priced in the thousands. The pressure on it is not that a tool replaces the illustrator. It is that the editor can now see twenty rough versions before lunch, and expects the illustrator to have seen them too.

Photography did this to painters once, and painting moved.

The nineteenth century is the useful comparison, because it is not a comforting one. When photography arrived, the portrait miniaturists and the painters who made a living from likenesses lost that living within a generation. Painting did not end. It moved toward what the camera could not do, and the people who made the move were not always the people who had lost the work. Nobody should pretend that a technology shift is painless for the trade it lands on, and nobody should pretend it ends the craft.

• Likeness work went to the camera; painting moved toward colour, light and interpretation.
• Hand typesetting disappeared within a decade of desktop publishing; graphic design grew out of it.
• Engravers who cut an artist's drawing into a plate were replaced by photomechanical printing; the illustrator's name stayed on the cover.
• Each time, the question was not whether the old job survived but where the judgment went.

What an illustrator does that a tool does not.

A tool makes a picture. An illustrator decides which picture: where the camera stands, what the character is doing with their hands, what the reader should notice first, and whether the eleventh page still looks like the same world as the first. That judgment does not get cheaper when the pictures do. If anything it gets more valuable, because the number of pictures to judge goes up. The law has already drawn roughly this line. The United States Copyright Office has refused registration for images produced entirely by a machine, and registers work containing AI-generated material only to the extent of what the human actually contributed: the selection, the arrangement, the direction.

One publisher hired the artists first, and keeps their work live.

WonderBooks is a useful case because it has sat on both sides of this. In 2016 its first version, My Wonder Books, was built the conventional way: a story writer, human illustrators, human translators, human narrators, all hired and directed by the founder, sketch by sketch, draft by draft. It shipped eighteen illustrated stories, was picked to pitch at Harvard that year, and went on to 976 ratings and more than 100,000 downloads on Google Play. Then it stopped, because every page was a commissioned painting and a production partner never came. It was stopped by cost, not by demand.

That app is still live today, with its original pictures and its original design, for one stated reason: pride in the people who made it.

They are artists. I love them. When we worked with them, we were so proud that we kept the legacy app live just to show their work.

At 29,179 pages, a human-painted library is not expensive. It is impossible.

The library that exists now has twelve subject libraries, 2,341 illustrated books and 29,179 painted pages, in thirteen languages. Nobody declined to hire illustrators for it. There was no version of it that could be hired. A commissioned painting per page at that scale is not a budget line a small publisher can negotiate down; it is a project that does not get made, and a reader who never gets a book about Hatshepsut or the transistor with a picture on every page.

The founder's answer to the fairness question is the one the argument usually skips: where the saving goes. Not to a higher margin, but to the reader, as access to the whole library instead of a price per book, and as pictures that carry more than a human schedule would allow: the equations written on the blackboard in a science book, the carvings on the temple wall in an Egypt book. The quality holds, in his account, because the structure was written before any picture was made, rules for where the camera stands and how a character stays the same across a book, and pages that break it are rejected and repainted. The direction is the job that did not go away.