The June 2024 headline that AI would “kill” creative jobs that “shouldn’t have been there in the first place” compresses a narrower, qualified remark attributed to Mira Murati, then OpenAI’s chief technology officer. The reported comment concerned some creative jobs, and a later account included a condition about work producing low-quality content. It was not a claim that all creative work should disappear.
What did Mira Murati say about creative jobs?
Futurism reported on June 25, 2024, that Murati made the remark during an interview at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering the previous month. Its article quotes her as saying, “Some creative jobs maybe will go away,” and then, “But maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” Futurism cited Fortune for the quotation; the Dartmouth recording or transcript is not established here as an independently checked source. Read Futurism’s report.
The phrasing matters. A later TechRadar Pro retrospective, published June 13, 2026, gives a fuller version: “Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality.” That account makes explicit a qualification about output quality. Because it is retrospective reporting rather than the original interview record, the fuller wording should be attributed to TechRadar Pro rather than treated as a verified transcript. Read TechRadar Pro’s retrospective.
What the headline does—and does not—mean
“Kill” is headline language, not the short quotation reproduced in Futurism’s article. Murati’s reported words refer to some creative jobs, not every creative occupation, every artist, or the value of creative work in general. The longer version reported later also frames the comment around work whose content is not very high quality.
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Murati was also reported to have predicted broader changes: some jobs would change, some would be lost and others gained, with strictly repetitive work more exposed. Those are predictions about possible effects, not measured employment outcomes. The reviewed coverage supplies no verified, suitably scoped employment-impact figure to quantify the prediction.
How a separate interview framed the job risk
On June 25, 2024, Washington Post host Lizza Dwoskin interviewed Bret Taylor in a separate conversation. Dwoskin brought up Murati’s remarks and asked Taylor about AI replacing jobs; this was not Murati’s Dartmouth interview. Taylor said near-term displacement was possible if software adoption moved faster than workers could reskill, while also expecting new jobs over the longer term. He described the challenge this way: “I think the uncomfortable part of this technology is how quickly the technology will be adopted and how quickly we as society can re-skill into those new jobs.” Read the Washington Post interview transcript.
Taylor’s comments offer a distinct lens on the issue: the pace of adoption may matter alongside whether new roles eventually emerge. They do not verify Murati’s wording or establish how many jobs AI will replace.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What readers can take from the exchange
- The remark was attributed to Murati, OpenAI’s CTO at the time, in reporting about a May 2024 Dartmouth interview; Futurism published its report the following month.
- The reported claim was about some creative jobs, and the later fuller wording ties it to low-quality content—not to all creative work.
- Predictions about job losses, job changes and new roles should not be mistaken for observed employment data.
- Taylor’s separate Washington Post interview emphasized a possible mismatch between how quickly employers adopt AI and how quickly workers can reskill.
TIME also covered the public response to Murati’s comments in a September 2024 profile and identified her as CTO during the relevant period. TIME disclosed a licensing and technology agreement with OpenAI; its coverage is useful context, not an independent transcript of the Dartmouth exchange. Read TIME’s profile.
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