Are you against using AI with junior creatives?

No. I use AI in my own work, led by judgment, and I want my team fluent in it. What I am against is handing a junior the tool as a substitute for the thinking. Use AI to skip the drudgery that teaches nothing, then put the person on the decision that does. The tool should raise the floor of what they work on, not remove the work.

How do you train judgment if AI does the grunt work?

You give people real decisions with real consequences early, and you let them be wrong where it is safe. Judgment is not a lecture. It is reps on work that ships, with someone experienced reviewing the calls. I would rather a junior own a small honest piece end to end than assist on a big one they never had to decide.

AI Took the Work That Trained Us by Tyler Garner

Q: Doesn't automating repetitive tasks free people for better work?

It can, but only if you actually redirect the reclaimed time into harder thinking. The D&AD report says the shops that spend the time AI gives back on deeper thinking are unlocking work a model could not predict. Freed time that goes nowhere just leaves the same team doing thinner work. The payoff only arrives if a leader spends the hours on purpose.

The work that made me any good is work I could hand a model tomorrow. D&AD published its AI and Creativity Report, built on interviews with 197 creative leaders, and one finding cuts deeper than the rest. The entry-level work is disappearing. Much of the repetitive, unglamorous work that AI now handles in an afternoon is where the next generation of creative leaders used to get trained. Kill that work and you do not just lose a few jobs. You lose the pipeline that makes anyone worth promoting.

What did the D&AD report actually find?

D&AD's AI and Creativity Report found the creative industry is taking a shortcut it does not fully understand. Left alone, AI trends toward average output. Junior roles are vanishing. The shops that spend the time AI gives back on deeper thinking are unlocking work a model could not predict. D&AD's CEO, David Patton, framed the choice: value judgment over shortcuts and protect the rigor that separates competent from exceptional.

I read that and nodded. The report is not anti-AI. Neither am I. It is a warning about what you quietly give up when efficiency becomes the only thing you measure. The cheapest thing to automate is often the thing that was teaching someone.

Why does entry-level work matter if AI can do it faster?

Entry-level work paid you in reps. The output was almost beside the point. I spent years earlier in my career on tasks a model could now do in minutes: cutting rough assemblies, laying out the version nobody would ever see. Boring, yes. But every one of those passes was a small lesson in why a thing works or does not.

You do not learn where the line should go by reading about it. You learn it by putting the line in the wrong place over and over and feeling the difference.

Strip that out and you hand a junior the answer without the question. They can operate the tool. Judging what it gives back takes years of reps, and those reps are exactly what is disappearing.

Can you train judgment without the boring work?

Only partly, and the line is whether the work holds a decision. Boring work that still asks you to choose is training. Boring work that asks nothing is labor, so give it to AI. What you cannot skip is a junior owning a decision and living with the result. Someone makes a call, someone experienced reviews it, and the gap between the two becomes next week's instinct.

The trap runs on a delay. If AI does all the junior work, the junior never makes the small calls, so they never build the instinct, so there is no senior five years out. The pipeline does not collapse in a quarter. It collapses at a promotion cycle, and nobody sees it coming.

How do you build a creative team when AI does the junior work?

I keep junior creatives on real decisions on purpose. Not assisting on a decision, owning one. A small piece, honest and complete, that ships with their name on the thinking. AI takes the passes with no real call in them, the resizing and the file cleanup. The time it saves goes to the hard part: deciding whether the work is any good and whether it tells the truth.

In attainable housing that standard is not optional. Getting it right comes first, and speed comes after. A render, a floor plan callout, a leasing email all have to survive a real person arriving at a real building. A junior who has only ever approved what a model returned has not learned to catch the gap between the picture and the place. A junior who has been made to decide has.

I hand a model my own first passes all the time. I can, because I already spent the years making those calls by hand. For me that pass no longer holds a decision. For a junior it still does, so before I automate one, I ask whose reps it was.

What should creative leaders do about AI taking junior work?

Spend the hours AI hands back on purpose. The efficiency is real, so decide out loud where the reclaimed hours go, or they will quietly turn into a thinner team doing shallower work. Put juniors on decisions early, and review those decisions as closely as you review the deliverables. Let AI raise the floor of what a young creative works on and leave the deciding to the person.

And be honest that this costs you something now. Training people is slower than letting a model finish the file. It is also how you end up with a shop worth running in five years.

The shortcut is real and it is tempting. I just think a leader who automates away the work that makes leaders is not being efficient. They are eating the seed corn and calling it a good year.