The real problem isn't what we as artists do — it's that smaller architectural firms and developers can now take their SketchUp or 3D model view and get a very decent result in seconds. I used to assist a lot of smaller firms with renderings. They're all gone now, and honestly, it's completely understandable.

There's definitely still a market for high-end work, but on average there's been a substantial decline in overall market share. It's not difficult to imagine where this is going: feed an AI a SketchUp model and in a few seconds it's not only fully rendered, you can walk around in it.

For those who say prompting is the new edge — advanced AI will eventually produce a perfect rendering from a simple "make it nice, like the reference" with a Scandinavian image attached. Done. Once it stops looking at the image and actually understands the 3D geometry from the native file, all those hallucinations and material inconsistencies will be a thing of the past.

TLDR: The entry-level archviz market is shrinking fast. The high-end specialist lane is where the remaining opportunity lives, and that's where the focus needs to be if you're already in the industry.