Frame your creative relationship with AI
Marcus is a creative director at a mid-size agency. Over the past eighteen months, AI tools have automated much of the production work that junior designers used to do: resizing assets, generating layout variations, creating style guides from mockups, compositing images. His team is more efficient than ever. Clients are happy. Margins are up.
But Marcus notices that his two most recently hired junior designers are not developing the way their predecessors did. The tedious production tasks they are missing, the ones Marcus himself complained about as a junior were actually where he learned to see. Spending hours kerning type taught him typographic sensitivity. Resizing layouts for different formats taught him proportion and hierarchy. Compositing images by hand taught him color relationships.
His juniors are technically proficient with AI tools, but they lack what Marcus calls "material intuition," the embodied understanding that comes from repetitive, hands-on work. When AI produces something that is 80% right, his juniors cannot identify or articulate what is wrong with the remaining 20%.
Marcus raises the issue with his agency's management. The response: "If they need those skills, they should learn them on their own time. We can't afford to pay people to do work that AI does faster." A junior designer overhears and privately agrees: "I didn't go to design school to do production work. I want to do creative direction." Marcus wonders: "How do you direct if you never did the work?"
What do you think?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Are entry-level production tasks genuinely necessary for developing creative expertise, or is that a nostalgic assumption?
• If AI eliminates the apprenticeship model, what should replace it?
• Should agencies invest in training that AI has made economically unnecessary — and who should pay for it?
• Is 'material intuition' a real skill or a name for something that can be taught differently?
• How should the creative industry handle the gap between what AI makes efficient and what professionals need to learn?
