Taste - The Only Thing AI Cannot Generate

There’s a line I keep coming back to: “Just as software ate the world, taste is now eating software.”

It’s not hyperbole. It’s where we are.

The Bottleneck Moved

For most of history, the hard part was making things. You needed a designer for the logo, a developer for the site, a musician for the song. Skill was scarce, and scarcity conferred value.

AI collapsed that. You can generate all of it in minutes, for free, at a level of quality that would have taken a professional days.

So the bottleneck shifted — from can we make this? to should we make this? That’s a fundamentally different question. It can’t be answered with more compute. It requires judgment. It requires taste.

What Taste Actually Is

Taste isn’t preference. Preference is picking a font you like. Taste is knowing which typeface makes the brand feel trustworthy without trying — and immediately feeling the wrongness when someone picks the other one.

The gap between those two things is enormous. And it’s built slowly: through years of looking at good work, making things that disappoint you, and sitting with the discomfort long enough to understand why.

Ira Glass called this the “taste gap” — the painful early years where your judgment is ahead of your ability. The cure, he said, was volume. Keep making until the work catches up to the taste.

AI closes the skill gap from the production side. Beginners can now ship polished work on day one. But the taste gap — knowing whether what you made is actually good — doesn’t close with it. It just gets harder to notice, because everything looks competent now.

A Mirror, Not a Compass

AI is a mirror. It reflects the full accumulation of human creative output back at you, in any style, on demand. That’s genuinely useful.

But a mirror can’t tell you where to go.

Without taste directing it, AI defaults to the average — the statistically safe, the broadly acceptable, the competent middle. Researchers have shown that when AI systems are left in feedback loops with themselves, the outputs rapidly converge: the same atmospheric cityscapes, the same grandiose interiors, the same smooth corporate voice. The rare and interesting gets squeezed out. The average expands to fill everything.

This is what happens when you generate without judgment. Taste is what keeps that from happening. It’s the compass.

Taste Takes Time — That’s the Point

Steve Jobs dropped into a calligraphy class at Reed College after dropping out. No practical reason. Just curiosity. Ten years later, that class shaped the typefaces on the original Mac — the first personal computer with beautiful typography. “If I had never dropped in on that single course,” he said, “the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces.”

That’s how taste works. It accumulates sideways, through things that don’t seem useful yet. You can’t manufacture it on a deadline.

Rick Rubin contributes nothing technical to an album. No instruments, no mixing, no code. He sits in the room and listens. He knows what should be kept, what should be cut, and what shouldn’t exist at all. That’s the job — and it’s the one that can’t be automated, because it requires decades of accumulated judgment about what’s worth caring about.

That role is becoming the most valuable one in every creative discipline.

The Deeper Point

In early 2026, OpenAI’s president posted that taste is now a “core skill.” Tech Twitter ran with it. The meme came fast: these are the same people who wear Allbirds and cargo shorts.

The meme is fair. Talking about taste isn’t the same as having it.

But the underlying point survives the joke. The world is filling up with generated content — most of it fine, none of it necessary. The things that will actually matter, the things people seek out and pay for and remember, will be made by people with a real point of view about what deserves to exist.

That’s taste. And it matters now more than it ever has.