A few weeks ago, I was working on a creative piece and used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help develop some ideas. Within a few minutes, I had more options than I knew what to do with. Different headlines, different directions, different visuals, and different ways of telling essentially the same story.
A few years ago, getting to that point might have taken an entire afternoon, perhaps even a few people in a room. Now it took minutes. I remember looking at everything in front of me and realising something interesting. Generating the ideas was no longer the difficult part. Choosing was.
Some of the ideas were technically good but felt predictable. Some looked impressive but did not quite fit. One was beautifully written but simply did not sound like something I would say. There was nothing obviously wrong with most of them. In fact, that was what made the decision difficult. They were all good enough. But good enough and right are two very different things. Eventually, I chose one direction, discarded most of the others, and kept working on it. That experience made me think about a skill we do not talk about enough: taste.
For a long time, one of the most valuable professional abilities was being able to create. If you could write well, design well, build software, produce videos, analyse data, or develop a strong presentation, you had something relatively scarce. AI is changing that equation.
Today, we can generate 20 headlines in seconds, explore multiple designs, rewrite presentations, develop campaign concepts, create video scripts, analyse information, and produce variations of almost anything before we have finished our morning tea. What once required hours can increasingly be done in minutes.
That is an extraordinary shift, but it creates a new problem. When creating becomes easier, choosing becomes harder. If AI gives you 50 headlines, which one should you use? If it produces 10 designs, which one actually feels right? If it suggests five strategies, which one should you bet on? If you can generate a 100 ideas in an afternoon, which three deserve your attention?
Being able to produce options is useful, but knowing which option is worth pursuing is something else entirely. That, to me, is taste.
We usually associate taste with fashion, art, music, food, or design, but taste exists everywhere. A salesperson develops taste for how to approach a conversation. A leader develops taste for when to explain more and when to simply make the decision. A marketer knows when a campaign feels forced. A writer knows when a sentence should disappear. A product leader can look at 20 possible features and recognise that the product would actually be better with five. Taste is knowing what to keep, what to change, what to question, and perhaps most importantly, what to leave out.
Think of a chef standing in front of an enormous pantry. Having more ingredients does not automatically create a better meal. In fact, the temptation to use everything can ruin it. An experienced chef knows that sometimes a dish needs one more ingredient, but sometimes what it really needs is less. AI has given all of us an enormous pantry. Taste determines what we cook.
This matters because AI is making average quality incredibly easy to achieve. A presentation can look professional almost instantly. An email can sound polished. A social media post can be perfectly structured. An advertisement can look good enough to publish. A video can look impressive before anyone has stopped to ask whether the idea behind it is actually worth watching. Good enough is becoming abundant, and when good enough becomes abundant, the question changes from “Can you make this?” to “Do you know what good actually looks like?”
The interesting thing about taste is that you cannot simply prompt your way into having it. Taste is developed through exposure. You read great writing and terrible writing. You look at excellent design. You watch brilliant films and forgettable ones. You study businesses outside your industry. You travel. You talk to people who see the world differently. You notice why certain things stay with you while others disappear immediately. Slowly, you build an internal library of references, experiences, mistakes, preferences, and patterns.
I think of it like tuning an instrument. At first, two notes may sound almost identical. But after years of listening, a musician can hear the difference immediately. The notes did not change. Their ability to recognise the difference did. The same thing happens professionally.
A photographer who has studied thousands of photographs sees a frame differently. A writer who reads widely hears when a sentence feels wrong. An experienced salesperson senses when a pitch has become too polished and stops sounding human. A strong leader recognises when the team needs another explanation and when everyone simply needs direction.
This is also why curiosity matters. If all you consume is what everyone else in your profession consumes, your taste will eventually begin to resemble everyone else’s. Some of the most interesting ideas come from crossing worlds.
A marketer studying architecture may notice something another marketer misses. An engineer reading psychology may approach a product differently. A teacher exploring game design may rethink how students learn. The more interesting and varied your inputs become, the richer the internal library you have to draw from.
AI should absolutely be part of this process. Let it generate 20 options. Let it challenge your first idea. Let it create variations you would never have had time to explore. Let it help you move faster. But do not confuse having more options with having better judgement. Someone still has to look at those 20 possibilities and say, “Not this. Not this. Maybe this. Definitely not that. This one.”
That moment of selection may become one of the most valuable parts of our work. As AI makes creation abundant, judgement and taste become more important. The future may not belong only to people who can create faster than everyone else, because almost everyone will be able to create quickly. It may belong to the people who can recognise what is original, useful, meaningful, beautiful, or simply worth putting into the world.
AI can give us more choices than we have ever had before. Our responsibility is to develop the taste to know which ones deserve to exist.
Keep learning and growing.