The Taste Problem

When Effort Stopped Signalling Quality

The Instagram carousel (a swipeable sequence of images or slides posted on social media) that took you four hours of genuine thought looks identical to the one assembled in eleven seconds.

For twenty years, creative credibility ran on a single premise: visual quality was expensive. A polished piece of work took hours of real effort. A well-lit photograph required equipment, training, or both. A written piece with genuine rhythm required someone who knew what they were doing. The polish itself was the proof. If something looked considered, it was because someone had considered it.

AI dissolved the effort signal in under two years.

When a piece looked polished, audiences concluded that someone had cared. That conclusion is no longer reliable. When a signal breaks, the market searches for a new one.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, named what the new signal would be in a 20-slide memo posted on New Year’s Eve 2025.

He used cameras to make the point. Camera companies, he argued, are competing to make everyone look like a professional photographer from 2015. But in a world where AI can generate flawless imagery, “the professional look becomes the tell.” Slide twelve is where the memo’s argument lands. After eleven slides establishing that AI can replicate the appearance of professional craft, Mosseri draws the conclusion: “At that point we’ll need to shift our focus to who says something instead of what is being said.” This is a precise claim about how trust moves. When polished output can no longer tell you anything about the person who made it, the output stops being the signal. The person becomes the signal instead.

What is left, the one thing no tool can fake, is taste.

What Taste Actually Is

Start with what taste is not.

Taste is not aesthetic preference. It is not having opinions about fonts. It is not knowing what looks good. All of those things can be faked, borrowed, or generated. They are not taste.

Taste is what you bring to every decision in a creative process. It does not ask “is this competent?” It asks “is this right: for this audience, this moment, this specific purpose?”

AI is very good at “could.” Ask it for options and it will produce forty of them, all technically competent. What it cannot do is choose. Out of fifty competent options, it cannot tell you which one is right for this audience, this brand, this specific moment in the argument. That ability to choose, and to know you are choosing correctly, is taste. AI has no history with your work. No memory of what landed last time. No sense of what this audience needs right now. You have all of that. That is what cannot be copied.

In 2009, the radio producer Ira Glass, host of the American public radio programme This American Life, gave an interview about exactly this gap. It has circulated among creative professionals ever since. Beginners get into creative work, he said, because their taste is already strong. The problem is that their taste exceeds their ability. They can sense the work is wrong but cannot fix it yet. The gap closes slowly, through volume.

AI has flipped this. The question is no longer whether you can make something. It is whether you can tell which version is right. That ability is built over years, through having opinions, defending them, being wrong, and starting again. No tool generates it from a prompt. You have been building it for longer than you think.

Every Democratisation Is a Taste Test

The displacement of a technical skill by democratising technology: this has happened before. It just tends to take longer than two years.

In 1985, PageMaker (desktop publishing software) and the Apple LaserWriter put a print shop inside every office. Typesetting had been the work of trained specialists. They understood leading and kerning (the spacing between lines and between individual letters) and knew when not to mix typefaces. Suddenly all of that was available to anyone with a Macintosh and an afternoon. The first generation of desktop-published newsletters used approximately every font available simultaneously. By 1989, offices were drowning in justified text, clip art, and drop shadows rendered at 72 dots per inch.

The typographers and designers who survived that flood were not the ones who learned PageMaker fastest. They were the ones with enough taste to know which of its capabilities to leave unused.

They did not just survive. They became more valuable.

In 2010, the iPhone 4 camera marked the moment when photography no longer required expensive skills or equipment. The image-making floor rose sharply. Professional photographers were widely declared redundant. What actually happened was that photographers with genuine visual judgement became more valuable, not less. The ones who could see something worth capturing before lifting the camera: they were the ones who survived.

The technical floor rose. The taste ceiling rose further.

The pattern is the same every time: the floor rises. The question of what is worth making becomes more important than the question of whether you can make it.

The difference this time is speed and scope. AI has raised the floor not on one skill but on dozens simultaneously: writing, design, music, code, photography, video, strategy documents, analysis. The taste test is happening across every discipline at once. And the people who had been quietly building judgement in their field are, right now, the most valuable people in the room.

The Three New Signals

After the old signal breaks, the market searches for new ones.

Three qualities emerged as the new signals. All three were already being built by anyone who had spent years doing genuine creative work.

Mosseri named them in his memo. Specificity. Voice. The visible presence of a real person’s perspective.

Specificity is the observation that only someone in that room could make. Not “AI is changing creative work” but “on the Thursday morning after our studio read the Mosseri memo, we retired our standard content template for the first time in two years.” The machine can approximate general. It cannot approximate yours. It does not know what your Thursday morning felt like, what specific decision preceded this one, what two things were rejected before you landed here. Specific detail is a proof of origin. It costs nothing to add and is impossible to replicate.

Voice is not consistent tone across a brand. It is the specific way one person sees and responds to things: what they notice first, what they reach for instinctively, how they frame a point that no one else would frame that way. Voice takes years to build. You cannot copy what took that long to accumulate.

The visible presence is sometimes the smallest thing. The educator Rishi Shine (known for his essay-style carousels) signs every cover with “by Rishi” in handwriting. One handwritten line in an otherwise designed system. The machine-perfect system breaks exactly once. The reader registers it: a person was here.

The cost of the signal is zero. A signature. The one specific detail no one else would have included.

For Patient Comet, the equivalent of “by Rishi” is “by Nadim” in a script font on every cover. Not because it looks good. Because it is the one element in an otherwise pixel-perfect system that a machine, left to its own devices, would never think to add.

Each of those three signals comes from the same place. And what they come from has one property no other skill shares: the more you use it, the stronger it gets.

Taste Gets Stronger With Every Decision

Most skills wear down over time. Taste does the opposite: the more decisions you make with it, the sharper it gets.

Every creative choice you make, from which headline to which case study to where you end a paragraph, sharpens a sense of judgement that becomes the filter for the next choice.

Every creative professional who has ever stopped at a bad layout and asked themselves why it was wrong has been building taste. Every person who has rewritten a headline three times, or cut a paragraph they loved because it was not serving the argument, has been doing the same. They just did not call it that.

This is why experienced creative directors are not faster processors of options. They are more refined refusers of options. That ability is a store of “yes, this” and “no, not that” built through years of looking at work that was trying, and mostly failing, to be good.

As AI tools generate more options faster, this matters more than it ever has. When a tool generates forty competent options in the time it once took to produce one, the question of who chooses becomes the only thing that matters. The person who can judge those options, quickly and accurately, just became the most important person in the room.

The wider industry is starting to formalise this shift. Cannes Lions, the industry’s benchmark awards festival since 1954, made this concrete in 2026. For the first time in the festival’s history, all submissions are now checked for proof of origin and genuine human authorship alongside craft (Cannes Lions, 2026). What Cannes is saying, in its careful institutional way, is that the creative industry has moved from valuing who can make it to valuing who can judge it.

The question, then, is not whether to build taste. It is how.

How It Gets Built

Taste is not received. It is built slowly, through a specific kind of practice.

The way to build taste is not to consume more work. It is to have more opinions about the work you consume. The designer who can spot a wrong spacing decision from across a room did not develop that ability by reading about spacing. She developed it by stopping at bad spacing. Naming exactly what was wrong. Understanding why. Doing that enough times that the judgement became automatic.

Three practices matter more than any tool or tutorial.

The first is cross-domain exposure. The sharpest taste in any field tends to be built on fluency in adjacent ones. The designer reads novels; the strategist studies architecture; the engineer has spent real time with music. Not because the domains share technique but because they share the same question: what to include and what to leave out. Paul Rand (the American graphic designer, creator of the IBM and ABC logos) read widely outside graphic design. Dieter Rams (the German industrial designer whose work became the direct inspiration for Apple’s design language) drew from music and architecture. Taste built in one room tends to come from inputs gathered in several.

The second is defended positions. You do not have taste unless you have opinions you will argue for. What sharpens taste into something useful is this: being able to say “this is right and this is wrong”, with a real reason, even when the alternatives are also technically fine.

The third is the mistake archive. Every call you got wrong is tuition paid. The headline that underperformed. The design direction you championed that confused the audience. The feature you shipped that nobody used. Taste only compounds if you stay in the room after the wrong call and understand specifically what you missed. Not “it didn’t land” but “I misjudged this because I prioritised x over y.” The specificity is the compound interest.

Who Becomes Most Valuable Now

All of this leads to a single, practical question.

What should you actually be developing in yourself, and in the people around you?

AI produces the options. You choose the right one. That is no longer a soft skill. It is the core skill.

Before AI tools became capable, the expensive thing to develop was technical skill: how to produce something at the required standard, how to operate the tools, how to meet the spec. Now, the expensive thing to develop is judgement. How to look at a room full of options and know, immediately and with a clear reason, which three deserve attention. How to say “not that” in a way that moves work forward.

This also changes who you want in the room. The person who produces the most options fastest is not the most valuable person at this stage. The person who can judge quickly and explain clearly why one direction is better than another is worth considerably more than they were five years ago. That explanation, in terms a colleague can act on, is what makes the judgement useful beyond one person.

Mosseri ended his memo with this: “In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity, by being real, transparent, and consistent, will stand out.”

Strip out the platform-speak. What he is describing is a reputation built on real, specific, consistent judgement. That is taste, applied in public.

The Asset You Already Have