Taste: The Skill AI Cannot Fully Borrow From You

Taste sounds like a luxury skill until the world is flooded with acceptable options. Then it becomes practical. If AI can generate many drafts, designs, strategies, and answers, the valuable person is often the one who can tell which option fits, which one is cheap, and which one deserves to exist.

Taste is compressed experience

Taste is not mysterious. It is pattern recognition shaped by exposure, standards, feedback, and consequences. You develop taste by looking carefully, comparing options, noticing details, and learning what survives contact with real users or real stakes.

AI can imitate surface patterns. It can even help you compare. But it does not automatically know your audience, your constraints, your brand, your ethics, or the moment.

Selection becomes a job

When output is scarce, production gets rewarded. When output is abundant, selection gets rewarded. A person with taste can reduce a field of options to a strong direction. They can say what is almost right and why. They can protect work from becoming generic.

• Taste asks: does this fit the situation?
• Taste asks: what should be removed?
• Taste asks: what will feel cheap in six months?

How to train taste

Build a swipe file of excellent examples. Compare good work to mediocre work. Write down why one version is stronger. Ask for feedback from people with better taste than yours. Most importantly, ship things and observe reactions. Taste without reality becomes opinion.

• Study the best work in your field.
• Practice ranking options and defending the ranking.
• Develop standards before deadlines force compromise.

Try this

• Collect five examples of excellent work in your field.
• Write three reasons each one works.
• Use those reasons as criteria for your next AI-assisted draft.

Resources

A few strong places to go deeper if this idea resonates.

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• Paul Graham essays
• Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger