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Understanding how automation changes work — task by task, with the evidence shown and the uncertainty admitted.

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On this pageWhich technologiesHow it got hereMethod and sources
Occupations›Illustrator›How we know

Illustrator — how we know

The page itself gives the judgements. This one gives what they rest on: which technologies bear on the work, how the estimate moved since language models reached the public, and the method behind both.

Assessed
2026-09-30
With evidence
4/5
Verified events
8

Which technologies matter here#

Four separate signals. They are deliberately not added together — a job exposed to two technologies is not twice as exposed.

Cognitive automation
Editorial and commercial illustrationConcept art and visual developmentGame art assetsCommissioned art for published products
Process & self-service
Rights and licensing

How it got here#

The index is not a static number. This is where it would have sat at each capability checkpoint since ChatGPT — reconstructed, and labelled as such.

Reconstructed · platform inferenceEstimated today for each past checkpoint — not measured at the time. 28 → 58.
1007550250
Fine artists including illustrators will decline 3 percent from 2025 to 2035, as AI-generated illustrations may compete with illustrators, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimatedNetEase tells investors it integrates AI across game development, including art and animation production, to improve its developers' productivityGamehaus tells investors its developer partners can use a trained art-style model to produce characters, costumes, scenes and iconsA US federal appeals court held that the Copyright Act requires eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being, affirming denial of an AI-made picturePrompts alone do not make a user the author of AI output, though AI-generated background artwork can sit inside a protected work, the US Copyright Office concludedThe US animation union's agreement lets producers require AI use, but bars requiring prompts in a way that displaces covered employees and requires advance written noticeWizards of the Coast requires artists contributing to Magic and Dungeons & Dragons to refrain from using generative AI tools to create final productsSurveyed managers said 39% of early adopters in US film, television and animation were implementing generative AI for character and environment design123456789not assessed
2022 H22024 H2Now

—— this stretch contains a verified event- - - no event in this stretch — reconstruction only0 = no task exposed, 100 = every task exposed

● 8 verified events for this occupation, plotted at the date it happened — the parts of the line near a marker are anchored to something checkable.

Starts at 28 because digital painting and design software were already standard before this chart begins, while the drawing itself still came from an artist's hand. It climbs quickly with the image-generation releases that could produce illustrations, concept art and game assets from a prompt, and stays below the top because some commissioners exclude generated art from final products, the animation union's contract limits displacement, and US law protects only work a person authored.

12022 H228General-purpose text generation reaches the public. Before this point, exposure came from automation that was already deployed — OCR, RPA, machine vision, self-checkout, dispatch algorithms. ChatGPT research preview (2022-11-30) ↗
22023 H131A general model that passes professional exams. First-draft quality crosses the threshold where professional work starts using it. GPT-4 (2023-03-14) ↗
32023 H237Vision input, long context and tool calling. Models can be pointed at documents and connected to systems, which is what moves process work rather than writing work. GPT-4 Turbo:128k 上下文、视觉、工具调用(DevDay) (2023-11-06) ↗
42024 H143The same capability gets much cheaper and faster. Nothing new becomes possible; a lot becomes affordable at volume, which is when deployment decisions change.
52024 H248Reasoning models that work through multi-step problems, and the first models that operate a computer by looking at the screen. The second one is what reaches software-operating jobs. OpenAI o1(推理);同期 Claude 的 computer use 进入公测 (2024-09-12) ↗
62025 H151Agents begin operating real software end to end rather than producing text for a person to paste. This is also when the first public reversals appear — organisations that automated and partly undid it. Claude 3.7 Sonnet 与 Claude Code:混合推理 + 命令行编码代理 (2025-02-24) ↗
72025 H254Long context and tool use become the default rather than a feature. Capability gains continue; the visible constraint shifts from what models can do to liability, procurement and cost. GPT-5(2025-08-07);Claude Opus 4.5(2025-11-24) (2025-08-07) ↗
82026 H156Long-horizon agents land inside specific industry workflows. Adoption becomes sector-specific rather than general. GPT-5.5:「专为实际工作打造」 (2026-04-23) ↗
9Now58The current assessment — this point is the impact index published on the occupation's page, so the curve is anchored to a number the site already stands behind. Worth noting for the flat curves: in the same weeks, a research preview of a shared specification for AI agents to operate physical devices was opened to research labs and manufacturers. That is the first capability class pointed at the physical occupations whose lines here barely move. GPT-6 Astra(2026-09-03);Claude Fable 5.1 / Mythos 5.1(2026-09-01);Model Hardware Standard 研究预览(2026-08-27) (2026-09-03) ↗

A flat line is not a forecast of safety. It says which tasks automation has reached so far — the occupations that moved least here are the ones where the constraint is physical or regulatory, and both of those can change.

Method and sources#

Assessment date
2026-09-30
Basis of the task judgements
4 evidence-backed · 1 platform inference · 0 not enough evidence
Verified events
8

How we assess an occupation →

← Back to IllustratorThe other layer: every task, one by one →Skills, knowledge and related jobs (O*NET) →