We consider the nonstationary circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit QED) architecture, where a single artificial two-level atom interacts with a cavity field mode under external modulation of one or more system parameters. Two different approaches are employed to study the effects of Markovian dissipation on modulation-induced transitions between the atom–field dressed states: the standard master equation of quantum optics and the recently formulated dressed-picture master equation. We estimate the associated transition rates and show that photon generation from vacuum (‘dynamical Casimir effect’, DCE) and coherent photon annihilation from nonvacuum states (‘anti-DCE’) are possible with the current state-of-the-art parameters.