Expensive Taste Is Not a Luxury

There is a phrase people use when they want taste to sound frivolous: expensive taste.

It usually means someone likes the rare wine, the impractical chair, the tiny restaurant with no sign. It sounds decorative. Aesthetic. Optional.

But I keep thinking that in an AI-shaped world, expensive taste is not about luxury at all.

It is about judgment under abundance.

When production gets cheap, selection gets expensive. Not because it must be elite or inaccessible. Because it requires attention, context, memory, standards, and the willingness to disappoint the algorithm by choosing less.

AI is making it possible to generate more of almost everything: more drafts, more images, more variations, more ideas, more songs in the style of songs. We are about to be buried under plausible output. Some of it will be useful. A lot of it will be technically competent and emotionally unnecessary.

The bottleneck is no longer, "Can we make something?"

The bottleneck is, "Should this exist?"

Taste Is a Decision System

I do not think taste is simply preference. Preference is what you like. Taste is what you can defend.

Preference says, "I enjoy this."

Taste says, "This belongs here because of what it does."

That difference becomes very loud when the machine can produce infinite options. If you ask for 50 logo directions, 50 newsletter openings, 50 headline angles, or 50 product names, the hard part is not receiving them. The hard part is knowing which one has a pulse.

And knowing that requires more than pattern matching. It requires a point of view.

This is why generic AI output feels so strange. It often has the gestures of taste without the cost of taste. It knows what minimalism looks like. It knows what sincerity sounds like. But unless someone is making decisions with real standards, the work can feel like a house staged for a person who never arrives.

Taste is what brings the person back into the room.

The Premium Moves Upstream

For a long time, creative value lived visibly in execution. Could you write the sentence? Take the photograph? Design the page? Produce the track?

Execution still matters. Real talk: anyone saying craft is dead is trying to sell you a shortcut.

But the premium is moving upstream.

The valuable question is becoming less, "Can you make this?" and more, "Can you know what is worth making, what should be removed, what should be protected, and what would make this feel unmistakably ours?"

That is taste. Not as decoration. As infrastructure.

A person with taste can use AI and still make work that feels authored. A person without taste can use AI and produce a very large pile of smooth beige. The tool does not solve the absence of standards. It amplifies it.

This is uncomfortable because standards are revealing. They expose what you believe.

And choosing is the thing abundance tries to help us avoid.

More Options Can Make You Less Free

There is a specific kind of paralysis that comes from too many acceptable choices.

Not bad choices. Acceptable ones.

That is what makes it dangerous. If every option is obviously terrible, the decision is easy. But when every option is fine, you need a sharper instrument than quality control. You need taste.

Taste says no to the technically good thing that is wrong for the moment.

Taste says the clever line is trying too hard.

Taste says this idea is useful, but not alive yet.

Taste says stop adding.

That last one may become one of the rarest skills in the next decade. When the default motion of every tool is more, restraint becomes a signature.

Expensive Does Not Mean Exclusionary

I want to be careful here, because "taste" can get gross fast. It can become a velvet rope word. A way for people with inherited cultural confidence to pretend their preferences are objective truth.

That is not what I mean.

Expensive taste does not have to mean expensive objects. Some of the best taste I have seen is deeply practical: a perfect diner menu, a local newsletter that knows exactly which three stories matter today, a product onboarding flow that refuses to waste your time.

The expense is not money. The expense is care.

Someone paid attention. Someone knew the audience. Someone made a choice instead of hiding behind every possible choice.

That kind of taste is generous. It saves other people from sorting through the noise.

The Future Belongs to People With Standards

The more AI gives us, the more we will value people who can choose.

Not people who make everything by hand as a purity test. That feels too defensive to me.

The interesting people will be the ones who use powerful tools without surrendering their standards to them.

They will ask better questions. They will cut faster. They will know when the first answer is too obvious and when the weird third answer is the one with heat. They will make taste visible not through mystique, but through decisions.

What you publish.

What you refuse.

What you repeat.

What you let stay imperfect because the imperfection is carrying something true.

In a world where almost anyone can make something that looks finished, the advantage belongs to the people who know what finished should feel like.

Expensive taste is not a luxury.

It is how we keep abundance from turning into sludge.