A few weeks ago, I was reviewing a set of concepts for a client brief.
They came in quickly. I opened the file and started going through them. At first glance, everything looked fine. Clean layouts, safe colors, decent type. Nothing was broken.
But after a few screens, I realized something was off.
Every option looked like it could belong to any brand. The imagery felt stock. The layouts were predictable. If I removed the logo, I wouldn’t know who this was for.
That bothered me.
So, I got on a call with the designer and asked, “How did you land on these directions?”
The answer was simple. “I tried a few prompts. These were the best ones.”
And that explained everything.
People keep having the same conversation. Everywhere I look, someone asks it in a slightly different way. “Is AI going to replace creative jobs?”
I don’t think that’s the right question.
Because we’ve been doing this for years. We’ve sat through impossible briefs, navigated difficult clients, thrown away ideas we loved, and rebuilt from scratch. That kind of instinct doesn’t disappear overnight. You don’t replace it with a tool.
But there’s someone else I keep thinking about. The person at the beginning of their journey, who’s supposed to spend the next few years figuring things out the slow, messy way. And instead, we’ve handed them a tool that skips all of that and called it progress.
When I started out, the work was rarely good. And that was the point.
You’d try something. It wouldn’t land. You’d try again. Still off. By the fifth or sixth attempt, you’d start to see something shift, not in the output, but in your thinking. You’d begin to notice patterns. You’d start questioning your first instinct. You’d learn when something feels right, and more importantly, when it doesn’t.
That process was exhausting. But it built something. Personality. A unique point of view. An ability to look at ten options and know, without being able to fully explain why, which one is worth keeping.
None of it came from getting it right the first time. It came from getting it wrong enough times that you started to understand why.
AI is designed to remove friction. And that’s why it’s powerful. When you already know what you’re doing, it speeds you up without taking anything away. It’s a genuine accelerant for someone with developed judgment.
But here’s what nobody wants to say plainly: judgment doesn’t come pre-installed. It’s built through exactly the kind of friction AI is optimized to eliminate. The struggle was the curriculum. And we’ve quietly removed it without replacing it with anything.
I’m not worried about AI replacing creativity. Creativity is sitting with a brief that doesn’t make sense and slowly untangling it. It’s knowing when to follow instructions and when to challenge them. It’s making a call when there isn’t a clear answer. That’s still human. That takes time.
What I’m worried about is something quieter.
That designer who sent me those concepts wasn’t lazy. They were working exactly the way they’d been taught to work in an AI-accelerated environment. Get prompts in and options out. Pick the best ones and ship them. It looked like productivity. But what it produced was work that felt like it could have been made for anyone, because it had never been filtered through a specific point of view. Because that point of view hadn’t been built yet.
If we keep optimizing for output speed and call it efficiency, we’ll get more work that looks right but feels empty. We’ll produce faster, and we understand less. And in ten years, we’ll wonder why the senior creatives all seem to think the same way, and why nothing anyone makes feels like it came from an actual person.
The friction wasn’t the problem. It was the training ground. And right now, we’re concreting over it and calling it innovation.
Storyteller
