The Importance of Taste in the AI Era

The first time I watched someone use an AI to write code, I felt a familiar sinking feeling. It wasn't that the code was bad. It was that it was adequate. The AI produced something that worked, that passed the tests, that satisfied the requirements. And that, I realized, was the problem.

We're entering an era where mediocrity becomes free. Not just cheap—free. The AI will generate the blog post, the logo, the business plan, the Python script. It will do so instantly, politely, and without complaint. And in doing so, it will flood the world with things that are... fine.

This is why taste matters more than ever.

The End of Technical Barriers

For most of history, making things required skill. If you wanted to write an essay, you had to learn to write. If you wanted to paint a portrait, you had to learn to paint. The barrier to creation wasn't just imagination—it was execution. And execution took years to master.

AI removes that barrier. It democratizes execution without democratizing judgment. Anyone can now produce a thousand images, a thousand essays, a thousand business ideas. But most of them will be boring, because most people's taste is boring. They don't know what's good, and now they don't have to learn.

The result will be a kind of inflation. When everyone can produce content, the value of content drops. But the value of good content—content with taste—rises. The scarce resource is no longer technical ability. It's the ability to know what's worth making.

Taste as Selection

There's a common misconception that taste is about appreciation—knowing which paintings are good, which restaurants are excellent. But for makers, taste is primarily about selection. It's about saying no.

The AI will give you infinite options. It will generate twenty versions of your landing page, fifty variations of your product description, a hundred possible company names. Most of them will be competent. Some will be clever. A few will be genuinely good. Your job is to pick the good ones.

This sounds easier than it is. The problem with infinite options is that they paralyze. Without taste, you have no filter. You either choose randomly, or you choose based on obvious metrics—what's most popular, what's most similar to what already exists, what pleases the most people. You choose the average.

Taste is what lets you navigate the space of possibilities without getting lost. It's a compass that points toward what's interesting, what's surprising, what resonates. And in a world of infinite generation, having a compass is the difference between wandering and arriving.

The Taste Gap

I suspect we'll see a widening gap between two types of people: those with taste and those without. The ones without taste will use AI to produce endless mediocre work. They'll be busy, productive, and invisible. The ones with taste will use the same tools to amplify their judgment. They'll produce less, but what they produce will matter.

This isn't a new pattern. When photography was invented, people predicted the death of painting. Instead, painting evolved. Freed from the obligation to represent reality accurately, it could explore what reality meant. The photographers captured what was there; the painters captured what they saw.

Similarly, AI will handle the execution of the obvious. It will write the boilerplate, generate the stock images, produce the generic marketing copy. Humans with taste will handle the rest. They'll decide what deserves to exist. They'll curate, edit, and direct. They'll ask the questions that lead to interesting answers.

Developing Taste

The worrying part is that taste is hard to develop, and AI might make it harder. Taste comes from making things, from failing, from seeing your failures and understanding why they failed. It comes from the friction between what you imagined and what you produced.

If AI removes that friction—if it lets you skip straight from idea to adequate execution—you lose the feedback loop that builds taste. You never learn to see the gap between what you wanted and what you got, because the AI fills that gap for you. You remain a permanent beginner, outsourcing your judgment to the average of human preference encoded in the model.

The people who will thrive are those who use AI as a tool but maintain the discipline of taste. They'll generate a hundred options and develop the discernment to pick the one that matters. They'll use the AI to explore faster, but they'll still do the hard work of deciding what's worth exploring.

The Return of the Editor

There's a role that I think will become more important: the editor. Not the copy editor who fixes grammar, but the creative director who decides what should exist. This person doesn't need to execute—they need to choose. They need taste.

In a sense, this is a return to older forms of creation. Renaissance artists didn't mix their own paints; they had workshops for that. What made them artists was their vision, their judgment, their ability to direct. The AI is the new workshop. The artist is the one who directs it.

But direction requires knowing where you want to go. And that requires taste.

What to Do

If you're young and trying to figure out how to navigate this new world, I have a suggestion: develop your taste deliberately. Make things without AI sometimes, so you understand the gap between intention and execution. Study the work of people who had taste—read their writing, look at their designs, understand their choices. Cultivate the habit of asking not "does this work?" but "is this interesting?"

The AI can give you competence. It cannot give you curiosity. It can optimize for engagement, but it cannot optimize for meaning. Those are yours to develop.

In the end, the importance of taste in the AI era is simple: when execution becomes abundant, judgment becomes scarce. And what is scarce becomes valuable. The future belongs not to those who can generate the most, but to those who can choose the best.

The AI will make us all producers. Taste will determine which of us are artists.