I saw a post last month that I still think about. Someone wrote a long, passionate caption about how AI is killing creativity, how real art needs a human soul, how they’ll never use it. The caption had every tell of an AI-written paragraph. The neat three-part rhythm. The “it’s not just X, it’s Y”. The perfectly balanced closing line. And the image above it was an AI-generated portrait of them in a film-grain 80s filter.
I’m not laughing at that person. Okay, I’m laughing a little. But mostly I’m noticing that this is the moment we’re in. Everyone wants to be a tastemaker. Almost nobody is willing to do the thing that makes someone one.
Taste is suddenly everyone’s favourite word
It’s been fascinating watching “taste” become the buzzword of the AI era. The argument goes like this: machines can now make anything, so the only thing left that matters is the human who decides what’s good. Tech leaders started calling taste a core skill. Investors started funding it. One founder raised $18.5 million in June for a company whose mission is to “end AI slop” by teaching AI to have taste.
Let that sit for a second. We built a machine that makes average things very quickly, decided the cure is taste, and are now trying to build a machine for taste too.
And on the ground, everyone has rebranded. Every LinkedIn bio says curator. Every content creator says tastemaker. People who press “generate” forty times and pick the nicest result describe that as having an eye. Picking from a menu is a skill, sure. But it’s not the same skill as knowing what to cook.
So what is taste, actually?
I don’t think taste is liking nice things. Lots of people like nice things. I think taste is three things together.
A point of view you arrived at slowly. You watched, read, wore, listened, got it wrong, changed your mind, and over years you developed an opinion you can actually explain.
The nerve to stand behind it when it’s unpopular. Taste that only ever agrees with the room is just good manners.
Making things, or at least choosing with consequences. A tastemaker puts their name on something. The edit, the shop, the collection, the playlist, the magazine. If it’s bad, people know who to blame.
Notice what’s missing from that list: speed. Taste has never been fast. It’s built from slow attention, and slow attention is exactly what the current internet is designed to take away from us.
The contradiction everyone is living in
Here’s what bothers me. The people loudest about “taste is dying” are often the ones speeding up its death.
You can’t complain that everything looks the same and then use the same three prompts as everyone else. You can’t mourn the death of personal style while dressing exactly like your For You page. You can’t write an essay on the soul of art with a tool whose whole design is to produce the most statistically likely sentence. One writer made the point neatly: if you average everyone’s taste, what you get is not great taste, it’s the safe, competent middle we’ve been calling slop.
That’s the irony. Taste is dying precisely because everyone wants to be a tastemaker. When everyone is performing discernment, broadcasting opinions, posting their “edit”, the word stops meaning anything. A tastemaker used to be rare because the role was earned. Now it’s a bio.
I’m not anti-AI. I’m anti-pretending.
I want to be fair. I use technology all the time to run this magazine. Tools aren’t the enemy, and a tool used by someone with real conviction can make wonderful things. Photographers didn’t stop being artists when cameras became automatic.
My issue is honesty. If you used AI, say so. If you didn’t, great. But don’t post machine-made work and call it your vision, and definitely don’t use machine-made work to lecture everyone else about authenticity. That’s not taste. That’s marketing with a nicer font.
The real ones are still here
And here’s the hopeful part. Real tastemakers still exist, and you can feel the difference instantly. The tiny vintage shop owner who only buys what she’d wear. The bookstore with a handwritten shelf of staff picks that’s better than any algorithm. The stylist whose references are so specific you have to look them up. The friend who sends you a song you’ve never heard and is right every single time.
None of them call themselves tastemakers. That’s usually how you know.
If you actually want taste, the route is boring and it works. Consume less but more carefully. Go deeper into fewer things. Form opinions before checking what everyone else thinks. Make something and let people judge it. Get it wrong in public. Keep going. In a world where anyone can generate anything in seconds, the slow, stubborn, human version of you is the only thing nobody else can make.
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