AI can now create songs, articles, and videos in minutes.
So you might wonder what’s left that’s you? Taste.
AI is compressing time needed for manual labor. Taste (trained attention plus constraints applied to lived experience) decides what to make, what to keep, and why it matters.
Taste comes from your direct experience which I believe can be shaped on purpose through awareness and constraints.
It is now one of the most important things you can develop as a human being. Here’s what I think it is, why it matters and how you can start developing it in yourself.
What is taste?
To start, I’d like to share a few quotes on taste from great minds of the past and present:
Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.
What this means: taste is a trained capacity. Reliable judgment comes from good sense + refined perception, built through practice and comparison, while actively weeding out bias. The “standard” is the joint verdict of such trained judges.
Any practical activity will, provided that it is integrated and moves by its own urge to fulfillment, have aesthetic quality.
What this means: The aesthetic isn’t separate from life. Taste grows from lived experience: shaping actions so they “hang together,” not from abstract rules about art.
Look for what you notice but no one else sees.
What this means: taste begins with attention. It starts with the way YOU notice things. The more you pay attention to your own experience, the more your taste can be developed.
So our working definition
Taste is the expression of your direct life experiences, refined by your attention, intuition, and constraints.
It’s a distinct perspective that comes out of you (consciously or unconsciously) from direct experience.
Direct experience is what it sounds like—your subjective perception of reality in your life: what you pay attention to, how / why things mean certain things to you, how you interpret experiences, and so on.
Okay so that’s what it is, but why does it matter?
Why taste matters in the age of AI
To explain why taste matters, I want to touch on three points here:
How AI changes the way we work
Attention as the new currency
Survival
1. How AI Changes The Way We Work
You no longer need to do all the work manually.
AI compresses manual labor of creation: production, drafting, editing, etc.
The durable edge is selection, meaning, and cohesion; That is what taste is, so from this perspective, you can argue that taste matters because it will be one of the only things left… it matters by default.
2. Attention As The New Currency
Technology and social media have created massive shifts in society.
The way to have power in today’s world is to be able to influence other people to buy into your story, and to get people to buy into your story, you need to get their attention first.
Our attention influences how we perceive the world; what we focus on becomes our reality.
If you can earn someone’s attention, you contribute to their reality is. If you contribute what their reality is, you control the story and have more leverage to shape reality to your liking.
To capture attention, you need an interesting story and message that resonates in order for it to reach people in the first place.
In a world saturated with content, the way to grab people’s attention is to stand out. The way to stand out is to have taste.
If you care at all about having an impact on the world, this is why you should care about having taste.
3. Survival
To develop taste, you must have sufficient time for being in a creative headspace.
The biggest obstacle to protecting our creative time is our survival needs. How we pay the bills, job obligations, our relationships, limiting beliefs, etc.
Since AI reduces time to do manual labor of creation, it gives us more time back to be in that creative space. So it behooves us to lean into AI and use it to augment our work so that we can spend more time in a creative state of mind, cultivating our taste.
Those who are creating and telling a story reap the benefits of having more time to be in their creative headspace because their survival starts to become supported by their creative output rather than doing something else.
It’s a virtuous cycle:
AI buys back more time.
More time back → more time in creative headspace.
More time in creative headspace→ better taste.
Better taste → Easier to stand out.
Easier to stand out → Grab more attention.
Grab more attention → Higher odds of supporting yourself creatively.
Supporting yourself creatively → more time.
Leaning into AI helps protect creative headspace; renouncing it trades away the time you could be using to cultivate taste.
Let’s be real, AI is not going back in the box.
It’s already shown how much it can improve our lives in terms of efficiency and productivity.
If you choose to renounce AI fully, you will get outcompeted by those that learn to integrate and leverage it to create more time for themselves.
Choosing to be against AI would be going against your own survival in this case. And we are humans so like it or not, survival is part of the game :)
Tying this together
As AI lowers production costs and speeds everything up, your advantage is taste. It will increasingly determine who gets seen and attention converts into leverage.
The stronger your taste, the more your work can sustain you, giving you even more time to make better work.
How can you cultivate taste?
The best way to get better at something is through practice. Using a project as a sandbox is a great way to practice.
Here’s how you can set up a project to cultivate your taste:
Pick a narrow project (2–4 weeks): one song, essay series, video format, etc. Keep the scope small on purpose.
Set 1–2 constraints: length, palette, tools, audience, motif.
Reference diet (3:1): study 3 references before each piece; write one sentence on what you’ll steal.
Smaller projects create faster feedback loops on your creative decisions.
Over time, you will start to see you lean towards a certain aesthetic.
And that is your taste.
That’s all for now.
‘Til next time, much love and peace y’all.