The Expert Eye: Why Experience Still Matters in the Age of AI
My high school art teacher had a gift I didn't understand until years later. Every time I thought a piece was finished, he'd lean over my shoulder and say, "Almost. Just needs a little more." I'd stare at my work, baffled. What did he see that I didn't?
He had the eye. I didn't…at least not yet.
That gap between good and great is invisible to a novice. It only becomes visible through years of looking, making, failing, and refining. And it turns out, that gap is also where AI runs into its limits.
AI Didn't Take Our Jobs. But It Did Start a Very Interesting Conversation.
I was on a call last week with a good friend. She’s a scientific illustrator and an old colleague of mine. We were catching up, but the conversation kept pulling back to the same question: is AI going to take our jobs? We're in different fields she illustrates, I write and do marketing strategy, but we kept arriving at the same answer.
Not if you are an expert in your field and know what you're doing.
Here's what I mean. I recently tried to get Claude (sorry, Claude) to design a LinkedIn ad for a campaign I was running. I gave it headshots. I gave it the color palette. I spelled out exactly what I wanted. The result was, to put it charitably, not good. I ended up scrapping it and doing it myself in Canva in half the time. Obviously, I’m not anti-AI, but because I could see that it was not what my client would want, and I had the skills to fix it without burning another hour re-prompting a machine.
AI is wonderful, but the tools can’t replace creative (art, writing, video editing, etc.) judgment, which takes years to build.
The Difference Between Using AI and Knowing What to Do With It
My friend described her current process when using AI tools. She says sketches something by hand, uses AI to help refine the style, then reworks it herself in Illustrator. It’s never Claude or Gemini or any other design bot leading the way. Her vision leads.
As an artist she knows what she wants, she said, "I can explain what I want more carefully, tease it a bit and make it more original. This is something that makes it easier for me than for someone without the years of experience or background."
Someone without design experience can use the same tools and get something that looks... fine. Passable. Forgettable. Because they don't know what's missing. They can't feel when something is off. They don't see that the composition pulls the eye in the wrong direction, or that the color palette is screaming "generic template" or that the video looks just like everyone else’s video on social media (yes, people are already getting bored of the Capcut templates).
Illustrator didn't make everyone a designer. Dreamweaver didn't make everyone a web developer. AI won't make everyone a writer or an artist, but it will just make the gap between novice output and expert output less immediately obvious.
Until someone with the eye looks closely.
The Skill AI Will Never Be Able to Prompt For
And there's something else AI cannot simulate and that is working with humans. If you’ve worked in an agency, an art department or even a corporate communications team, you know your client or stakeholders don’t know exactly what they want. They might have a rough idea or they might have a goal in mind, but the details aren’t there or they aren’t quite sure exactly what they need yet.
So much of what I do and what friend does is essentially mind-reading. When we sit with a client, we get to understand their personality and their expectations in a way that can’t always be translated in an email. People express themselves through body language and words – and sometimes it’s what they don’t say that makes a difference.
You have to ask the right questions, try things, show directions until something clicks. That's not a prompt. That's years of working with difficult clients and hard-won instincts.
The other things is when the AI runs out of tokens and gives up mid-project, which, trust me, happens, the person with experience can keep going. I take what I've got and I finish it myself. Someone who was relying entirely on the tool? They're stuck.
Experience Is the Thing AI Can't Generate
AI is an accelerant. It makes me faster, better at generating first drafts and variations. But it still needs someone at the wheel who knows the difference between what almost looks like and what it actually takes to get to great.
So are all the creative experts out there going to be replaced by AI. Nope.
Your judgement is needed now more than ever to help clients stand out. And your detailed prompting is going to produce much more interesting projects than a novice could. I definitely foresee AI becoming an essential tool in your toolkit and even allowing you to do even more fantastic work.