On junior mistakes, pulled-up ladders, and the ugly work nobody tells you to be proud of.
The Email I Shouldn’t Have Sent
Early in my career, I sent a typo-filled email to a client. My head strategist was CC’d.
I got called out in the group. In front of everyone.
English wasn’t my first language. My inferiority complex was already sitting heavily on my shoulders before that moment. When it happened, I felt like I didn’t belong in the industry. Like I would never catch up. Like the gap between who I was and who I needed to be was too wide to cross.
My head strategist casually, not unkindly — implied the company direction was heading somewhere my competency couldn’t match.
I believed him for longer than I should have.
Looking back — I was always ready. I just wasn’t given a chance to prove it yet.
That email. That humiliation. That specific moment of public failure — no AI would have let that happen. No spelling checker, no grammar tool, no content assistant would have let that email go out.
And I would have learned nothing.
How I Actually Learned
I learned by doing it wrong.
Watching countless video tutorials that couldn’t prepare me for the real client. Taking junior roles just to understand how systems and workflows actually operated, not how they were supposed to operate.
When I was editing my fanzine DATURA — I just copied other fanzine styles and adapted them to myself. No rules or style guide. No mentor signing off on my aesthetic choices. Just — do it, feel what’s wrong, do it differently.
When I was doing UX research — no guide could prepare me for findings that didn’t match the survey or the project goal. You can have a mentor sitting next to you. You can watch endless tutorials. But nothing beats doing it in the field. In a real office. With a real senior who doesn’t hold your hand but shares their expertise and lets you find your feet.
The frustration was real. The self-doubt was real. The question — is this the right way of doing this? — was constant.
It was also the only way.
What The Junior Today Doesn’t Get
The junior copywriter today doesn’t get to send the typo email, because AI catches it first.
The junior photographer doesn’t get to miss the moment — the wrong angle, the bad light, the frame that didn’t work — and learn from why it didn’t work.
Because AI generates the image instead.
The junior visualiser doesn’t get to copy a style badly, feel that it’s wrong, and develop taste through that friction.
Because AI produces a polished version before the friction can form.
The entry-level role that was supposed to be the training ground — the brief that was too small to matter, the client who was too difficult to please, the project that taught you more in its failure than any success — that role is disappearing before the junior has had the chance to occupy it.
And the expertise that role was supposed to build — the judgment, the taste, the craft, the resilience — cannot be downloaded. Cannot be prompted. Cannot be automated.
It has to be lived through.
And the junior today is being told to race to learn AI tools — before anyone has given them the room to make the mistakes that would have made them worth keeping.
The Ladder They Pulled Up
Here’s what the senior expert with 20,000 or 2 million followers posting about AI slop rarely says out loud:
Their authority was built through junior failure.
The typo email. The copied style. The field research that didn’t match the project goal. The client presentation that went badly. The brief that was rejected. The work that was embarrassing in retrospect.
All of it — supervised, corrected, repeated — over years of having the room to be wrong.
That’s how they became senior. That’s how their expertise formed. That’s how their taste developed.
And now they post about AI slop — the messy, imperfect, not-quite-right output of tools being used by people who haven’t had the chance to develop judgment yet —
As if their own early work wasn’t slop.
As if they didn’t need years of making exactly that kind of work before they knew how to make something better.
The arrogance is loud. The ignorance is quieter. The insecurity — of someone who knows, deep down, that if AI had existed when they were junior, they might not have survived long enough to become senior either — that’s the quietest thing of all.
They’re not criticising AI slop. They’re protecting the ladder they climbed — by pulling it up before the junior can reach the first rung.
What Nobody Is Saying To The Junior
The junior today is racing. Learning tools. Justifying their existence before they’ve had the chance to develop the judgment that would make them worth keeping.
Nobody is telling them the thing that would actually help.
So let me say it directly:
The slop is the work. The insecurity is the process. The imperfection is not the problem — it’s the beginning.
Every senior expert who is now criticising AI output produced worse output when they were starting. They just had the luxury of doing it in a room where failure was survivable. Where a mentor called them out in a group chat and they lived to tell the story. Where the industry gave them enough rope to hang themselves — and then time to untangle it.
That luxury is being taken from the junior today. Not by AI. By the humans who decided AI could do the junior work — without asking what the junior work was actually for.
The Honest Truth About Slop
Slop is where craft begins.
Every fanzine I made before DATURA had the wrong proportions. Every UX report I wrote before I understood the field had conclusions that didn’t match the findings. Every design I produced before I developed taste was a copy of something that already existed.
That was my slop. It was necessary. It was mine.
The junior today deserves the same.
Not protection from AI. Not a masterclass on ethical prompting.
The room to be wrong. The chance to make the typo email. The client who rejects the brief. The project that teaches more in its failure than any success ever could.
Because that’s not where careers go wrong.
That’s where they start.
Embrace the slop.
Embrace the insecurity.
Embrace the imperfections.
Embrace every ugly piece of work you ever made.
Because this is where you start.
And nobody — no senior expert, no AI tool, no thought leader with 20,000 followers — can build that foundation for you.
You have to live through it.
That’s the only way it works.
This is not an industry analysis. This is what I observed — including about myself.
Draw your own conclusions.
Clarity is the most underrated business investment.
— Lokman S., Majalah BIKIN