The Friction Shortage

Two articles, from Zoe Scaman and Douglas Brundage, landed in my feed this week. I can't stop thinking about them together.

The first argues that taste isn't a collection of references. It's the long, private, often embarrassing process of figuring out what you actually like — as opposed to what you've been trained to approve of. Taste is accumulated through contact with the world. Through failure. Through sitting with a piece of music that makes no sense until, three years later, it suddenly does. Not through moodboards.

The second argues that the creative industry is quietly dismantling the conditions where that kind of accumulation happens. Junior roles down 29 percentage points since 2024. Median industry age past 40. The bottom rung of the career ladder not being kicked away — just not being rebuilt when it breaks. No announcements. No decisions. Just a thousand small choices that each make sense on their own terms, adding up to something that doesn't.

Read separately, both are sharp. Read together, they're a diagnosis.

What's actually disappearing

The industry is not just losing a tier of cheap labor. It's losing the conditions that build taste. The bad brief that a creative director rips apart in front of you. The research debrief where what the room responds to is completely different from what you thought the insight was. The project you led too early, before you were ready, and had to figure out by yourself at midnight. None of this was a training program. Most of it was accidental proximity — juniors were cheap enough that being in the room was a byproduct of having them around. The learning happened in the friction. And the friction is what's disappearing.

I was that junior. I spent years doing work that deserved to be demolished, and being around people willing to demolish it. What I built in those rooms — the ability to feel when something is wrong before I can explain why, to read a client's silence, to know which direction to kill before the client does — none of that came from tools. It came from repetition under pressure, from people who cared enough to say it wasn't good enough. I benefited from exactly the conditions I'm describing. I know what they cost. I know what they gave me.

Not a talent shortage

In ten years, the industry will have plenty of people who can use the tools. Generate fast. Hit the brief. Keep the format consistent. What it won't have — at anything close to the current density — are people who can tell you if the brief is wrong. Who walk into a room and feel the problem before anyone has articulated it. Who have a point of view specific enough that it couldn't have been borrowed from somewhere else.

That's not a talent shortage. It's a taste shortage.

Two moments, one conversation

Most of the conversation about AI and creative work focuses on one thing: production. How much faster. How many more assets. How much less friction between idea and output. And that part is real — AI removes the mechanical resistance from execution in ways that genuinely matter. A junior today can produce work that would have taken years of technical practice to attempt. The ceiling on what they can execute has moved dramatically.

But there are two distinct moments in creative work, and the industry is only paying attention to one of them.

The first is the moment of formation — strategic development, building taste, expanding the range of what you can even imagine. This moment requires friction. It needs exposure to things outside your reference frame, to perspectives that don't confirm what you already believe, to paths you wouldn't have chosen on your own. This is where judgment gets built. Where repertoire expands. Where the uncomfortable gap between what you think you know and what you actually feel gets wide enough to develop something real. AI can be extraordinary here too — not as a production engine, but as a friction machine. A tool that surfaces what you haven't considered, that challenges the brief before you've committed to it, that exposes the bias in your instincts before they harden into habit.

The second is the moment of execution — and here, AI removes friction deliberately and well. That's where most of the industry's attention lives. Understandably. The gains are visible, measurable, easy to sell.

The role nobody is naming

But the first moment is where the next generation either develops or doesn't. And that's where experienced creatives have a role that nobody is talking about clearly enough: not as executors amplified by tools, but as the people who bring intentional friction to the formation stage. Who know, from their own accumulation of scar tissue, what questions to ask before the work starts. How to develop taste deliberately rather than accidentally. How to expand repertoire beyond the comfortable. How to fight your own biases instead of encoding them into a prompt. How to build the courage to be wrong in a specific direction, rather than safely adequate in every direction.

Source code, not shortcuts

This is different from teaching technique. It's different from curating references. It's passing on the source code — the internal logic that makes a creative recognizable, the thing that makes their work impossible to confuse with someone else's. AI can amplify that once it exists. It can't create it from nothing.

The junior gets exposed to real decisions, real pressure, real stakes — faster than any previous generation. The senior stops being the executor and becomes something closer to what they actually are: the person who knows what creative DNA looks like when it's forming, and what it needs to form.

That's not a training program. That's a different kind of proximity. One that uses AI not to skip the friction, but to create it — deliberately, at the right moment, in the right direction.

Taste doesn't come back through a hiring policy. But it might come back through this.