Taste Is Getting Expensive

I think we’re entering an era where taste gets more valuable every week.

Not talent, exactly. Not raw output. Not even originality in the romantic, lightning-strike sense people like to mythologize.

Taste.

The ability to notice what matters, choose what’s worth keeping, reject what’s merely competent, and make that decision in public.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

Because AI is making execution astonishingly cheap.

You can generate ten headlines, fifty images, a full draft, a passable strategy memo, a playlist, a logo direction, a moodboard, a marketing campaign, and three alternate versions of all of it before your coffee cools down. We’re moving into a world where the default state of culture is no longer scarcity.

It’s overproduction.

And when production explodes, selection becomes the thing.

We used to confuse making with choosing

For a long time, creative value was bundled.

If you could make something well, your taste and your execution arrived together. The photographer had the eye and the technical skill. The DJ had the ear and the crate. The writer had the idea and the ability to shape the sentence.

Now those pieces are coming apart.

A person with mediocre judgment can produce polished work with extraordinary tools. A person with sharp judgment can use the same tools and make something far more alive. From the outside, both may look “high quality” in the shallow sense. Good lighting. Good structure. Good syntax. Good enough aesthetics.

But they do not feel the same.

One feels assembled.

The other feels chosen.

And I think audiences are getting more sensitive to that distinction, not less.

Competence is flooding the market

This is the part people still underestimate.

Most of what we called “good” was actually just hard to make.

If only a small group of people could produce something clean, coherent, attractive, or on-brand, then competence itself looked rare. It carried status. It signaled effort. It felt like proof.

But when competent output becomes abundant, competence stops functioning as a moat.

That doesn’t mean quality stops mattering. It means baseline quality gets cheaper.

And once the baseline gets cheap, the premium shifts.

Not to volume. There will always be someone producing more.

Not to speed. There will always be someone faster.

The premium shifts to discernment.

Who picked this idea? Why this frame? Why this reference? Why this sentence instead of the easier one? Why did you leave those other things out?

That’s taste.

Taste is expensive because it implies exclusion

Here’s what makes taste different from mere output: taste has a point of view, and a point of view always excludes.

That’s why it’s costly.

A person with taste is not just saying, “Here is a thing.”

They’re saying, “Out of all the available things, this is the one worth your attention.”

That requires judgment. It requires risk. It requires the willingness to be wrong in a visible way.

And that’s exactly what makes it valuable.

Machines are getting incredibly good at giving us options. But options are not the same as conviction.

A feed can predict what you’ll probably click. A model can generate what is statistically likely to satisfy the prompt. A recommendation engine can approximate preference patterns with eerie precision.

But approximation is not the same as taste.

Taste has edges. Taste disappoints some people. Taste makes tradeoffs. Taste says no.

That’s also why it becomes easier to recognize once everything else gets smoother.

The future might belong to editors more than makers

I don’t mean “editor” as a job title. I mean it as a posture.

The people who matter most in the next phase of the internet may be the ones who can cut through abundance with believable judgment.

Not the people who can generate endlessly.

The people who can narrow.

The ones who can say: this essay, not those fifteen. This reference, not the obvious one. This aesthetic, but not the overfitted version everyone else is already doing. This artist. This question. This signal in the noise.

In other words: the humans who can do more than make.

The humans who can mean.

I think that’s part of why certain creators are becoming more, not less, valuable in the age of AI. People aren’t just paying for access to content. They’re paying for contact with judgment.

They want to know what this person thinks is worth noticing.

That’s not a bug in the system.

It might be the whole business model.

So what do you do with that?

If you make anything—writing, design, products, media, playlists, brands, arguments—I think the move is pretty clear.

Stop treating taste like a vague personality trait. Treat it like a craft.

Sharpen your criteria. Explain your choices. Get better at rejecting what is merely pretty, plausible, or easy. Study why you like what you like. Notice your own defaults. Interrogate them. Refine them.

And maybe most importantly: let your judgment be legible.

Don’t just show people that you can produce. Show them what you believe is worth selecting.

Because in a world drowning in competent output, the rarest thing isn’t a person who can make more.

It’s a person who can look at infinite possibility and say, with clarity,

No. Not that.

This.