AI Made Making Things Cheap. Taste Got Expensive.

When production gets cheap, judgment gets expensive

Here's a pattern that shows up over and over in history. Whenever some skill suddenly becomes cheap and abundant, the next skill up the chain becomes the valuable one.

When printing got cheap, writing didn't lose value; editing and curation did. When cameras ended up in every pocket, taking a photo stopped being special, and having an eye for the right photo became the thing photographers actually sold. Cheap ingredients didn't make chefs worthless. They made judgment, what to cook and what to leave off the plate, the entire job.

AI is running that same play, just faster and across everything at once. Writing, design, code, video, music, marketing copy: the making of it is collapsing toward free. So the value doesn't disappear. It moves. It moves to the person who can look at ten options and say, with real confidence, "that one, and here's why."

There's even a name floating around for this now. People are calling it the "taste economy," and there's a genuine argument that curation is becoming more valuable than creation. I don't love turning everything into an -economy, but the underlying point is hard to argue with. The rare thing isn't the output anymore. It's the judgment behind it.

So what is "taste," really?

Taste sounds like a fuzzy, artsy word. It makes people who work in spreadsheets and sales pipelines think, "well, that's not me." But strip away the pretension and taste is just this: the ability to tell the difference between good and almost-good, and to know why.

That's it. It's not about being fancy. It's about calibration. A great salesperson has taste: they can feel when an email sounds pushy versus confident. A good operations manager has taste: they can look at a messy process and sense which step is the actual problem. A parent has taste when they know which battle is worth fighting tonight and which one to let go.

Taste is judgment applied to a specific domain. And here's the uncomfortable part: you can't fake it, and AI can't hand it to you. AI can generate a thousand options. It cannot tell you which one is right for your business, your customers, your voice. That decision still lands on a human who's paying attention.

Why this is good news for experienced people

If you've been around your industry for a while, you might be quietly worried that AI is going to flatten your advantage. All that hard-won know-how, matched instantly by a tool a 22-year-old is using for free. I'd argue the opposite is happening, and it's worth sitting with.

Experience is where taste comes from. You developed a gut for what works by making a lot of mistakes, watching a lot of deals go sideways, seeing what customers actually respond to versus what you assumed they would. That accumulated judgment used to be trapped, bottlenecked by how fast you personally could produce work. You had good instincts and only so many hours.

AI removes the production bottleneck. Which means your judgment now gets to operate at full speed. The person with twenty years of instinct and an AI tool isn't competing with the beginner and the same tool. They're operating on a different level entirely, because they know which of the AI's outputs to trust and which to throw away.

The beginner generates ten emails and picks one at random. The expert generates ten and knows immediately that eight are generic, one is trying too hard, and one is exactly right. Same tool. Completely different result. The difference is taste, and taste is the thing experience actually buys you.

The flip side: a rising tide of "fine"

There's a cost to all this cheap production, and we should be honest about it. When making things is nearly free, people make a lot of things. Your inbox knows this already. So does every social feed you scroll. The internet is filling up with content that's technically competent and completely forgettable, the writing equivalent of hold music. Some folks are calling it "AI slop," and the volume of it is only going one direction.

Here's the interesting twist, though. As the flood of generic stuff rises, anything with genuine taste behind it stands out more, not less. When everyone's email sounds like it came from the same machine, the one that sounds like an actual human wrote it gets read. When every website looks like the same template, the one with real point of view gets remembered.

Scarcity creates value. And in a world drowning in "fine," the scarce thing is good. That's not a threat to people who care about quality. That's the best market they've ever had.

How to actually build taste (it's not mysterious)

The good news is that taste isn't a magic gift some people are born with. It's built, the same way you build a palate for coffee or an ear for music, through exposure and attention. A few practical ways to sharpen it:

• Consume the best stuff in your field on purpose. Read the emails, ads, proposals, and websites that actually work. Not to copy them, but to notice why they work. Taste grows from studying excellence closely.
• Force yourself to say why. When something's good, don't just nod. Make yourself finish the sentence: "This works because ___." Vague appreciation doesn't build judgment. Specific reasons do.
• Compare, don't just evaluate. One option in isolation tells you little. Put three side by side and the differences jump out. This is also, not coincidentally, exactly how you should work with AI: generate several versions and choose, rather than accepting the first thing it gives you.
• Pay attention to your own reactions. The moment something makes you cringe, or lean in, or trust it a little more, stop and notice that. Your gut is collecting data all the time. Taste is just learning to listen to it.
• Ship, watch, adjust. Nothing sharpens judgment like seeing real results. Put the work in front of real people and pay attention to what actually lands. Reality is the best teacher taste ever had.

Notice that none of this requires a single line of code or a technical bone in your body. It requires attention. That's the whole toolkit.

The real shift

For a long time, the people who got ahead were often the ones who could produce: crank out the work, ship the volume, grind the hours. AI is steadily taking that lever away as a source of advantage, because now everyone has it.

What's left is older and more human than that. It's the ability to look at a pile of options and know which one is right. To have a point of view. To care about the difference between good and almost-good when almost-good is now free and everywhere.

My landscaping friend eventually picked his logo. Not because AI told him to, but because we sat there and talked about what his customers were like, what feeling he wanted a truck pulling into a driveway to give off, which version felt like him. The tool made the options. He made the decision. And the decision was the part that mattered.

That's the job now. Not making things. Choosing well. The tools are going to keep getting better at the first part. The second part is still entirely yours, and it's about to be worth more than it ever has been.