By Eric McGilloway • Smiths & Tailors
The conventional wisdom is that when supply increases, prices drop. And with AI flooding the market with generated content, a lot of motion designers are nervous. They're lowering rates. Accepting worse terms. Trying to compete with machines on speed and volume.
That's exactly the wrong move.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, reading industry research, talking to designers, looking at the data. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: if you're good at what you do, now is the time to raise your rates, not lower them. Here's why.
AI Didn't Flatten the Field. It Split It.
A recent survey of 380+ creative professionals by Motion found something that most of us already feel in our guts: AI didn't democratize creative work. It created a caste system. The divide isn't between people who use AI and people who don't. It's between people who've figured out how to use it strategically and everyone else who's just dabbling.
The research calls them "super performers"—the small group who treat AI as a strategic layer threaded through their entire production process. They use it to surface insights, compress research timelines, systematize the boring stuff. Meanwhile, most teams hover at the surface: brainstorming, summarizing, drafting. Useful, but shallow.
Here's the number that jumped out at me: only 6% of teams have hired AI specialists. Over half are just training existing employees. That means the divide isn't about hiring new people, it’s about which existing people level up and which ones don't.
Same thing is happening in motion design shops right now. The senior designer who figures out AI as a strategic tool isn't getting replaced. The mid-level designer still doing things the 2019 way? Well, that’s where the pressure is.
Why So Many of Us Hate AI
Before I make the case for raising rates, I want to acknowledge something: the anger about AI in our industry is legitimate. Most of it, anyway. Here's what I hear from designers I respect:
They stole our work to build it. Models were trained on portfolios, paintings, photos, and designs scraped without consent, compensation, or credit. The technology couldn't exist without us, and we got nothing.
The timing was brutal. AI arrived when VFX subsidies had already gutted jobs, streaming budgets were contracting, and freelancers were grinding harder for less. Kicking an industry while it's down.
The loudest advocates were assholes about it. Tech bros posting "made this with zero humans" like our obsolescence was a party trick. Hard to separate the tool from the culture that evangelized it.
It devalues the struggle. A decade learning to draw, learning software, learning client management—and someone types a sentence and gets "close enough." The insult isn't just economic. It's existential.
Everything looks the same now. The plastic Midjourney aesthetic. The uncanny Sora smoothness. Visual slop flooding every feed while actual style and craft gets buried.
I'm not here to tell anyone to love AI or even like it. But I am here to say that refusing to engage with it at all is probably self-defeating. You can hate how it was built and still need to understand it to survive.
Scarcity Didn't Disappear. It Moved.
Here's one of the things conventional wisdom misses: the scarce thing now isn't "someone who can make a thing move on screen." Any idiot with Runway can do that. The scarce thing is taste. Judgment. The ability to look at a brief and know what it actually needs versus what the client is asking for.
That's human. That's irreplaceable, at least for now. And when something becomes more scarce while demand stays constant, the price should go up, not down.
The problem is that most designers are responding to AI anxiety by lowering rates. They're scared, uncertain, trying to compete with the cheap AI-assisted work flooding in. Which is exactly the wrong move if your actual value proposition is "I'm the human who makes this good."
You don't compete with commodity by becoming cheaper commodity. You compete by being undeniably not commodity. And one way you signal that is price.
Why Rate Transparency Matters More Than Ever
Rate transparency isn't charity. It's infrastructure.
Right now, producers know what they're paying everyone. They have budgets, historical data, conversations with other producers. They know the market. Designers don't. We know what we charge, we have a vague sense of what our friends charge if we're lucky, and beyond that we're guessing.
That asymmetry tilts every negotiation in the buyer's favor. When you don't know the market rate, you anchor to your own fear. "I should probably ask for less to make sure I get the job." Multiply that across thousands of freelancers and you get systematic under-pricing. Not because the work isn't valuable, but because nobody knows what the work is worth.
History shows this works. Look at what happened in tech. For years, software engineers had the same problem…salaries were secret, negotiations were individual, companies exploited the information gap. Then Glassdoor happened. Levels.fyi happened. Engineers started sharing compensation data openly.
The effect was dramatic. Once engineers could see what companies actually paid, they stopped accepting lowball offers. They had leverage because they had information. Companies responded by raising compensation to stay competitive.
The pattern is consistent across industries: when workers share compensation data, the market corrects upward. The Graphic Artists Guild has published pricing guidelines since 1973. School of Motion's industry surveys give us benchmarks. The information asymmetry was always the thing keeping rates artificially suppressed.
A Different Model: The Micro-Business
There's another structural change I've been thinking about. The solo freelancer model is fundamentally weak by design. One person negotiating against a production company is always going to be outmatched. You have bills due, they have a budget and twelve other options. The power asymmetry is baked in.
What if instead of solo freelancers, we saw more micro-businesses? Not two designers competing for creative credit necessarily, that’s where partnerships quite often die. I'm talking about complementary roles: a senior designer who partners with a producer (the business development kind), an accountant or bookkeeper, and maybe a junior designer.
The designer designs. The producer finds clients, negotiates rates, manages relationships. The accountant keeps the finances clean. The junior handles execution while learning the craft.
This ain’t revolutionary. It’s just how successful small businesses work in most fields. The revolutionary part is that motion designers haven't adopted it as much as they probably should. The default is still solo freelancing or hoping to get hired by a studio. The middle path barely exists.
A designer in a micro-business with a producer partner, armed with industry rate data, is a fundamentally different negotiating entity than a solo freelancer guessing at numbers while worrying about rent.
What Gets Better
If rate transparency spreads and micro-businesses become more common, here's what could improve:
Rates stabilize and rise. Producers negotiate harder than designers. More producers on the sell side means more professional negotiation. Designers stop underselling out of impostor syndrome.
Careers become sustainable. The burnout problem isn't necessarily about hard work, it’s about doing everything alone while financially precarious. Distribute the load and suddenly a career to sixty becomes imaginable.
Quality improves. When you're not scrambling for the next gig while finishing the current one, you can invest in craft development. The best work comes from people who have space to think.
Juniors get a real path. Right now, becoming a motion designer means surviving a brutal initiation: low pay, no mentorship, unclear advancement. Micro-businesses with junior roles create structured paths that develop talent instead of just consuming it.
AI adaptation becomes manageable. The transition is hard enough without doing it alone. The micro-business distributes cognitive load: the senior focuses on creative integration pipelines, the producer handles positioning, the junior learns creative and organizational workflows from the start.
Collective soft power emerges. Five hundred solo freelancers can't coordinate. A hundred micro-businesses can form associations, share information formally, establish standards that have weight.
What Could Go Wrong
I'm not going to pretend this is all upside. Here's what could break:
Solo freelancers get squeezed. If clients prefer micro-businesses for reliability, the market for pure freelancers shrinks. Some will adapt, some won't.
Partnerships still fail. Complementary roles reduce ego conflicts but don't eliminate them. A producer who overpromises, a designer who resents the cut, a junior who isn't developing, it all still happens.
The "left behind" problem. Any structural change benefits people with resources and networks more than people without. The gap could widen even as the average improves.
Exploitation reconstitutes at smaller scale. Nothing guarantees micro-businesses treat juniors fairly. Without norms and standards, you might just get a thousand tiny exploitative shops instead of a few big ones.
Cultural resistance from designers. Many people became freelancers for independence. Partnership means compromising on autonomy. You can't force that change.
The Bottom Line
The shift I'm describing isn't going to happen automatically. Left alone, markets don't optimize for worker welfare. They optimize for efficiency, which often means extracting maximum value from labor.
A better industry requires people who care about it to actively shape it. Rate transparency and smarter business structures are tools for that shaping. They're only as good as how we use them.
But here's what I know for sure: if you wait until the market "stabilizes," you've already lost. The floor will have dropped, expectations will have reset, and climbing back up is brutal.
If you establish your rate now, while the chaos is happening, you're planting a flag. You're saying "this is what I cost, and here's why." Some clients will balk. Good. Those weren't your clients anyway.
The clients who understand the difference between AI slop and human craft will pay for it. But only if you have the nerve to charge for it.