Creative professionals are split on AI.
We recently surveyed a group of Vecteezy users to get their thoughts on AI and learn more about how they use it. 43% of respondents told us they believe AI will create new opportunities and jobs, while 41% expect AI to threaten their careers within the next five years. Just two percentage points separate optimism from anxiety.
Those numbers come from The State of AI in Creative Work, our new research report that combines a survey of creative professionals with behavioral data from Reimagine, our AI-powered photo editor. Most AI research only captures what people say about the technology, but we wanted to also look at what creatives actually do with AI, based on thousands of real editing requests.
The full report is available as a free download, and the highlights are below.
Creatives Use AI to Speed Up Their Work
When survey respondents were asked why they use AI, the most common answer was to speed up their workflow. 48% of all respondents listed this as one of the reasons why they use AI, and among daily AI users, that number jumps to 86%. Generating new ideas (40%) and refining existing work (35%) came next.
The number at the bottom of the list might be the most revealing. Only 25% of respondents said they use AI to create content they couldn’t otherwise make. Even among daily users, just 34% do. For most creatives, AI works as a production assistant, not a replacement for their own creativity.
The Reimagine data backs that up. The most common prompt submitted to the editor is “remove background,” and variations of background and object removal dominate the top requests. The median prompt is just 43 characters long, about the length of a short, specific instruction.
Download rates point in the same direction. About 78% of Reimage requests that involve object removal result in the user downloading the edited image, with background removal close behind at 72%. Users got the most value from AI when the task was clearly defined and production-oriented.
Mid-Career Creatives Are the Most Worried About AI
The survey’s most surprising finding involves experience level. Professionals with 4 to 10 years of experience are more anxious about AI than their junior and senior colleagues, and they use it far less.
Just 18% of mid-career creatives use AI daily, the lowest of any experience group. At the same time, 56% believe AI will threaten their career within five years, the highest of any group. Here’s how the groups compare.
| Years of Experience | Use AI Daily | Feel AI Is a Threat | Feel Positive About AI |
| Less than 4 years | 39% | 31% | 37% |
| 4 to 10 years | 18% | 56% | 11% |
| More than 10 years | 37% | 38% | 29% |
The reasons make sense when you consider each career stage. Early-career creatives entered the workforce alongside these tools and have less invested in established workflows. Professionals with more than a decade of experience have adapted to major industry shifts before, and many now hold leadership roles. Mid-career professionals have built enough of a career to have real stakes, but they haven’t navigated a disruption of this scale before.
The People Who Don’t Use AI Dislike It the Most
The strongest correlation in the survey data is between usage and sentiment. Among daily AI users, 77% hold a positive or cautiously optimistic view of AI’s impact on the creative industry, and only 6% feel mostly negative. Among those who never use AI, those numbers flip. 76% feel mostly negative, and just 8% feel positive. That’s a 70-point swing in positive sentiment between the heaviest users and non-users.
Looking from the other direction, 51% of those who hold a mostly negative view of AI have never used it, and another 24% rarely do.
This doesn’t mean skeptics simply need to try AI and their concerns will disappear. Even daily users have real worries. Their top concern is legal and copyright issues at 53%, ahead of job replacement at 49%. Hands-on experience seems to shift the worry away from existential questions about careers and toward practical questions about how AI-generated work fits into existing legal frameworks.
What Concerns the Industry Most
Across all respondents, these concerns came up most often.
- Replacing creative jobs (61%)
- Decline in creative quality (58%)
- Legal, ethical, and copyright issues (56%)
- Declining rates and salaries (39%)
- Job market saturation (37%)
Job replacement and creative quality each worry more than half of all respondents. Further down the list, concerns about rates and saturation point to a different kind of fear. Even if AI never eliminates creative jobs outright, it could lower the value of creative work by making passable output easier for anyone to produce.
About the Research
We surveyed 261 Vecteezy users in February 2026, solicited through our email list. Respondents include designers, illustrators, photographers, marketers, and other creative professionals.
The behavioral analysis covers 5,834 requests from 1,763 unique users of Reimagine during the feature’s first month of availability, including prompt text and request outcomes.
Get the Full Report
The full whitepaper includes a foreword from Vecteezy founder and CEO Shawn Rubel, commentary from the product team behind Reimagine, and a deeper breakdown of every finding covered here. As Rubel puts it in the report, Vecteezy builds “tools that support creatives, not tools that replace them,” and the data shows most creatives are using AI exactly this way.