Source: It's Nice That
As generative AI tools proliferate, junior creatives face a legitimacy crisis that's partly real and partly psychological. Actual displacement risk concentrates in commodity production—stock imagery, basic layouts, ad copy—while the bottleneck has shifted from execution to taste, strategic thinking, and client trust. Junior roles develop these skills. Shanice Mears's framing matters because it resets expectations away from existential threat toward a simpler fact: AI is a tool that changes which creative skills get valued. Junior portfolios built on problem-solving and perspective-setting outlast those built on technical execution alone. The career risk isn't AI itself; it's junior creatives treating avoidance as strategy rather than learning what kinds of work deserve their time.