Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left
5 hours ago
- #Taste
- #AI
- #Judgment
- AI makes competent output cheap, shifting advantage to judgment and taste.
- Taste involves distinguishing under uncertainty through noticing, rejecting, and precise explanation.
- AI-generated work tends towards average, creating a crowded middle ground, with judgment as the new bottleneck.
- AI reveals the quality of personal taste, highlighting the need for clear, precise critique.
- Taste improves via practice: generating variations, critiquing, adding constraints, and shipping real work.
- Taste alone risks reducing humans to curators; humans must own stakes, handle new ideas, and choose direction.
- Builders should use AI for exploration but add real context, constraints, and specificity to avoid shallow outputs.
- Active shaping with AI means rejecting generic outputs and adding domain-specific insights like user truths or trade-offs.
- Taste is a side-effect of serious work: studying, diagnosing, shipping, and staying close to reality.
- The real edge combines AI's speed with human judgment in direction, specificity, and consequences.