Jobs / Design, media, and writing
Can agents do design, media, and writing work?
Graphic design, video, audio, writing, editing, and other creative production.
- US jobs
- 2,046,270 (1.3% of employment)
- Typical wage
- $66K a year (employment-weighted mean of occupation medians)
- Occupations
- 45 in O*NET 31.0
- Evidence
- 4 benchmarks from 8 institutions
Task level
Partial
Only adjacent evidence. OSWorld-Verified includes tasks in image, slide, and document apps, and the best agent passes 90.2% of all its computer tasks. No task-level benchmark in our collection scores the quality of design or writing work.
Evidence: OSWorld-Verified — by Carnegie Mellon University, HKU, Salesforce AI Research, and University of Waterloo. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Project level
Not yet
On the Remote Labor Index, which includes graphic design, video, 3D, audio, and web projects from freelance platforms, the best agent completed 15.8% of projects to a standard a client would accept. GDPval deliverables score higher (84.9% wins or ties against professionals, reported by OpenAI), but those tasks are one-shot and fully specified.
Evidence: Remote Labor Index, GDPval, GDPval-AA — by Artificial Analysis, CAIS, OpenAI, and Scale AI. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
The best agents fail most tasks on the best available benchmarks.
Benchmarks for this work
Also relevant
These benchmarks cover part of this family's work.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
- OSWorld-Verifiedby HKU, Salesforce AI Research, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Waterloo90.2%Intelligence-Indeed Agent · 25 Jul 2026Saturated
Functions: Professional deliverablesComputer useSpreadsheet workFreelance projects
What we do not know
- Benchmarks measure tasks, not whole jobs. A job is a bundle of tasks, judgment, and relationships.
- Capability is not adoption. A task that agents can do in a benchmark may still be done by people at work.
- Most results come from single runs. Reliability over many runs is often unknown.
Occupations in this family
Sorted by US employment (BLS OEWS May 2025). O*NET sub-occupations share the employment figure of their SOC group.
How to cite
Credit the original work first: the benchmarks listed on this page, and their institutions.
Then, if you used this page:
Can Agents Work. "Can agents do design, media, and writing work?." https://canagentswork.com/jobs/design-media-writing/ (accessed 2026-09-24). CC BY 4.0.@misc{caw-jobs-design-media-writing,
title = {{Can agents do design, media, and writing work?}},
author = {{Can Agents Work}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://canagentswork.com/jobs/design-media-writing/}},
note = {Accessed 2026-09-24. CC BY 4.0}
}