Don’t Forget - Growth Comes From the Mundane
We quickly went from “AI is going to take your job” to “AI is going to take away the boring parts of your job”. “You’ll get to go straight to the creative bits and AI will do the boring stuff.”
The common rebuttal I see on places like LinkedIn and Reddit is a concern about what happens when we decide to use AI tools to do the interesting, creative bits as well? What will we all be doing then?
But right now the real risk isn’t that AI will replace the creative work - it’s that we’ll stop learning how to do the creative work at all.
Some people certainly are already trying this - they’re using AI to create photos for ads and write children’s books. Definitely things I’d consider creative outlets. But this isn’t the problem with this use of AI. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a problem, but more for what it’s masking.
The mundane, the boring, the tedious. That’s what makes the good part so good. That’s how we learn to do creative things so well.
Early in my career I spent endless days in the studio searching through stock photography for just the right images for an ad. Each time I found something I thought worked well I would drop it into the layout and bring a copy over to my EVP for a review. And each time (until I finally got it right) he would point out something wrong with the choice. The crop was off, there wasn’t enough free space for the copy to sit well, the angle of the subject was too sharp… Those corrections taught me what to look for - and eventually there were 2 rounds of revisions instead of 5. Learning Tim’s preferences helped develop my eye, and as I grew as a creative I developed my own preferences.
Later, as I moved into agency leadership I found the things that I wanted to create processes around but finding repeatable patterns in my day to day. It often became a refrain that I’d make to startup founders in my initial conversations before I developed the Sprint Zero process - have you tried making this work in a spreadsheet or workflow? Refining the flow led to how the product should work. Eventually this became a product in itself - the Sprint Zero - where we’d bring founders through a design-led product definition process. This would ensure alignment on business goals and help us all discover the best way to get there.
When we lean too much on AI to get rid of the mundane, the repetitive, the boring we eliminate this extremely important path to learning. For juniors, whether they’re restarting their career in a new path or fresh out of school, how are they supposed to learn without the repetition and guidance of seniors? AI is a tool, but it’s potentially a dangerous one because there really are no shortcuts in career development.
It’s similar to knowing how a computer works. [NOTE: Generalizations based on age are coming up. I know this isn’t true for all of those in a given generation, but it’s true enough in the shared experience of my peers.] Those who came of age and started careers (Boomers and older) had no idea how a computer worked, but were able to operate one. Those who came of age when the technology was new and still flawed (Gen X and Millenials) learned how to debug, defrag and had to start computers from a command line prompt to get anything done. We built desktop computers from components and later modified our early smartphones - early Android was practically unusable unless you installed a custom ROM. Then we created iPads and other extremely simple and intuitive GUIs. As a result the children who grew up as Gen Alpha and later had no reason to learn how to use a command line unless they were into programming. They have no idea how a computer is put together or how it works. To quote Steve Jobs “It just works.” While on the surface this was amazing, it eventually led to this problem of entire generations not having a foundation in how the thing they rely on for their livelihood works.
AI is the next step in this evolution. If we blindly employ it without building a foundation based on repetition and experimentation we’ll get further distanced from the reality of the things we use and need to succeed. And that might be just how the technological treadmill stops. Because if juniors get too distanced from the learning, they’ll never develop the skills to find the problems to solve.