"It's Gonna Take Our Jobs!" And Other Things We Yell at the Future

The Skills Debate: Are We Losing Them or Just Trading Them In?

Then there's the skills question, and this one keeps me up at night—partly because it's complex, partly because I see thousands of talented creatives graduating with only tens or hundreds of jobs up for grabs.

The doom-and-gloom crowd says we're going to lose fundamental creative skills. That juniors won't learn craft because AI will do it for them. That we'll become a generation of prompt engineers who can't actually design, write, or art-direct with any taste, finesse or insight.

When I started in this industry, you had to know your way around a Mac like it was a second language. The crafters learned typography by making terrible kerning mistakes and getting roasted for them in reviews. You developed an eye by looking at thousands of bad layouts until you could finally spot what made something good. There were no shortcuts. No "make it look professional" buttons.

But here's the thing—and this is where the debate gets interesting—we've been here before.

No doubt you’ve had this conversation or point of view shared with you recently. The old guard said desktop publishing would kill real design skills, they’d never adopt it, it was a fad. Before that, they said the same about computers replacing hand-lettering. And you know what? They were both right and wrong. We did lose some skills. But we gained others. The goalposts moved, and so did we.

My 12-year-old can edit video faster and better than I can. Is that a loss of skill or a different skill? When my 14-year-old troubleshoots technology I don't understand, is that a lack of fundamentals or a different set of fundamentals?

The real question isn't "are we losing skills?" It's "which skills matter now, and which ones are we romanticising?"

Because here's what I'm seeing: AI isn't replacing creativity—it's exposing who has it and who doesn't. When anyone can generate something that looks decent, the people who understand strategy, nuance, human emotion, and cultural context become exponentially more valuable. The gap between "technically proficient" and "actually good" just got significantly wider.

But, I argue that we have to actively choose to develop those deeper skills. We have to resist the temptation to let AI do the thinking. We have to be intentional about what we're learning and what we're outsourcing.

It's like teaching kids to use a calculator. Sure, let them use it. But make 100% sure that they understand the math first.

So What Now?

What we can do is pause, take a deep breath, and check the pulse of our industry. How are people actually using AI? Is it helping or hindering? What's it doing to our wellbeing? What skills are we protecting, and which ones are we accidentally eroding?

That's why,  at Never Not Creative, we've launched Never Not Human—an honest look at AI in the creative industry.

We want to know what you really think. Are you anxious, excited, overwhelmed, curious? Do you feel pressure to use AI tools? Is it making your work better, or just busier? Are you worried about your skills declining or disappearing, or are you excited about new ones emerging? This is your chance to share how AI is shaping your work and how it's making you feel.

With your insights, we can work on community solutions that help all of us navigate this shift with a bit more confidence and care. Maybe we can even figure out how to reclaim some of that promised productivity without sacrificing our sanity or our craft.

Because if we're the ones steering the ship—asking the hard questions, pushing back on the busywork, and protecting what actually matters, the future starts to look a whole lot less bleak and a lot more human.

Take the survey here: www.nevernotcreative.org/ai/2025-survey

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