Taste won’t save you. You don’t even know what it is >

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It has come to my attention that everyone with a chin to stroke has found their new opinion. There is a consensus among our greatest tech gurus, creative sages, and LinkedIn thought-leaders: Once the machines can do the fundamentals of the job, and the peons for whom the future is not promised have fallen by the wayside, the greatest humans will still have an edge.

The future will be theirs, because they have a special power.

They call it “Taste”.

Forbes call it “The Most Valuable Skill in the New World AI Economy ” and “The One Skill AI Can’t Copy ”, Fast Company investigates “Why Tech Bros Are So Worried About AI Having Bad Taste ”, The Drum has platformed the case for it being “The Most Valuable Creative Skill Today ”, and so on. If you really want, ask Claude to compile you a full list.

Sam Altman and his OpenAI president Greg Brockman have assured us that “Taste is a new core skill” and that Taste is one of the things that will get you hired in the years ahead. It is the last thing that compounds, the moat the algorithms can’t cross, the special secret sauce.

It’s no mystery why we’ve grabbed onto this story - it is equally flattering and reassuring. When technology floods the world with cheap, competent, forgettable work, the argument runs, the scarce and valuable human is the one who can look at a thousand options and effortlessly waft them away like the chaff they are to find the one special grain. The job is “have an opinion”, and not only do you have those, yours have the special quality of also being consistently correct. How wonderful!

Ding dong, who’s at the door? It’s the fun police.

First problem - “Taste” is a slippery concept. It’s a collection of ideas wrapped in a trench coat. First one we’ll get out of the way quickly: We cannot mean by it a stable set of rules which can be laid out objectively - if we did, then AI would obviously be easily able to reproduce it. So it must mean something harder to pin down, of which I see two remaining load-bearing interpretations.

The first interpretation is the poetic one most of the articles want to invoke - the sense that there is an almost platonic form of every creation, and Taste is the otherworldly ability to envisage and find that perfect form. From amidst a vast desert, your discerning Taste could uncover the single perfect grain of sand. The limit here is subjectivity. Your perfect grain of sand will most likely not be the same as someone else’s, even if you genuinely feel like it’s a masterpiece.

Alternatively, for the fans of post-modernism, Taste is a social construct. It has almost nothing to do with Art with a capital A, and everything to do with power with a small p. It’s the thing which lets people signal to each other that they’re in the club, they “Get It”; the thing which meant the graduate who showed up to his first round interview in a suit and tie got sniggered at; and it’s the excuse the crusty ECD used for ten years to reassure himself that nothing new mattered.

This should not be confused with snobbery, though it can blend with it. A common flex for someone with high cultural capital is to performatively celebrate “low” culture - the planner who insists they’re mad about Love Island, the creative who refuses to use punctuation, the exec who needs to show you their gym playlist is mostly UK Drill and Speed Garage. These awkward shibboleths signal authenticity and demonstrate that their Taste has democratic legitimacy.

Whichever meaning of Taste is being employed, the really serious problem is that none of these “Tastes” is of any use to the actual jobs of marketing, brand building, advertising etc. They help you make arbitrary decisions, and they help you navigate the social landscape of a creative career, but they’re not going to help you create something which changes the beliefs and behaviours of large numbers of people. Because by definition, the first version of Taste only matters to you, and the second only matters to the people in our industry bubble.

So, what then?

Oddly, I’m quite optimistic. Because if we strip off the trench coat, there are still useful concepts left behind, but we need to be picky about what we keep. Because:

1. Creative choices may often be arbitrary, but someone still has to choose, and put their name to the choice and take the consequences if it all goes south. There’s only a thin and treacherous line between a brave decision and a bad one. Call this the Reputational role; your job is to be a brand - the IBM no one ever got fired for buying.
2. No matter what, you can’t get it right all the time, because in culture, the ground is always shifting. So when is it time to pivot and reset so you can stand apart from the crowd? Or when do you jump on a bandwagon or risk getting left behind? These aren’t questions of Taste - of good or bad - these are questions of Timing, calibrated in the here and now; and a machine trained on everything that came before will forever be a beat behind.
3. We’re all going to be using roughly the same systems. The floor will be very high and very even. In theory, everyone will have access to all the creative output they could want. But people are remarkably bad at discovering what they might want beyond what they already have. The critical requirement is therefore not the refined palate of Taste, but rather insatiable Hunger: An omnivorous hunger for exploration, and discovery; a desire to ingest other peoples’ worlds, and to thereby anticipate their appetites.

So, forget talking about Taste - there’s nothing there worth praising.

Instead, burnish your Reputation, finesse your Timing, and never lose your Hunger.