"I made $40,000 a year painting pet portraits. Then AI ate my entire business"

Emily Olson painted pets for a living. Her watercolors were simple and warm — saucer-eyed corgis in mini-tuxedos, fluffy malamutes dressed up for holidays — and dog owners couldn't get enough. She sold them for $75 to $300 each on Etsy. In 2021, she made over $40,000 from her store, and her YouTube channel grew to 180,000 subscribers.

"They were a labor of love," she says. "Each one was different, each dog had its own personality. That's what people were buying."

Then AI happened. Competitors flooded Etsy with AI-generated pet portraits selling for a fraction of the price. Her listings started dropping in search results. The most frustrating part? The AI-generated art was getting great reviews.

"People were like, 'Oh, this is the cutest image, I love it in my daughter's bedroom.' They didn't really know or care who made it, they were just eating it up."

In 2022, her sales decreased by 30 percent. The following year, another 50 percent. In 2024, when Etsy officially announced it would allow AI-generated art on its platform — provided sellers disclosed it — Olson had seen enough. That January, she posted a YouTube video titled: "Etsy Was Great … Until It Wasn't—Why I'm Walking Away."

"Etsy doesn't align with my values these days," she said in the video. "It feels like they've just become another giant corporation chasing profits above all else."

She pivoted to Shopify, though sales there have been disappointing too. "It is definitely harder to sell on your own website than on communities like Etsy."

Her story is far from unique. Viktor, a UK-based illustrator who's been on Etsy for 10 years, says his sales have dropped 98 percent in the past year alone. "People have learned not to trust once-trusted sites like Etsy, because they are tired of seeing AI slop that is now infecting the site."

For Olson, the question goes deeper than one platform. "Art is a luxury, and with all this economic uncertainty right now, it tends to be one of the last things people want to spend money on," she says. "So I have empathy for people who don't buy hand-painted works of art, but I also think we will always want to seek out things of beauty that are made by real people."