In the age of AI, what’s truly rare is not creativity—but the ability to stay unhooked.
Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash
In an era where everything is being "recommended," our collective anxiety about taste has never been sharper.
Once, taste was the passport of the cultural elite. A byproduct of education, exposure, and slow refinement. It was earned through years of watching, reading, listening, noticing. But as generative AI rapidly expands its footprint across music, writing, design, and beyond, a new narrative has emerged:\ Maybe taste is the last human stronghold.
Sure, AI can write a headline, draw an illustration, or mimic your favorite director’s style. But it can’t feel. It doesn’t know what has soul. It can't pick your favorite album at age 16. It won’t weep at a midnight line in a forgotten poem.
So we tell ourselves:\ “Real taste—good taste—is still uniquely human.”
But is that belief a grounded truth, or simply our final emotional defense?
In When AI Has Better Taste Than You, Liron Shapira offers a sharp, slightly uncomfortable reframing:
“To be deemed excellent implies social validation. Some group of others must affirm the judgment.”
In other words, good taste is not about internal authenticity—it's about external predictability.
If you say someone has "great taste in music," what you’re really saying is: they have a good track record of picking things others also like. They introduce you to tracks that resonate. Their playlists align with your mood. They vibe with your friends too. They pick songs that would score well on Spotify Discover, or show up on Pitchfork’s front page.
Likewise, if someone consistently chooses great films, it's often because their picks match your worldview—or at least the worldview shared by IMDb’s Top 250. That cultural benchmark isn’t subjective. It’s a quantifiable alignment with collective taste.
And this is where it gets uncomfortable:
If taste is mostly about pattern recognition and consensus prediction—then AI can absolutely learn it.
Shapira explains this bluntly: if great taste arises from absorbing cultural cues and forecasting value before it's obvious, then it’s something an AI can replicate.
A model doesn’t need to understand cinema. It just needs to know which films are saved most often, which color palettes receive the most likes, which sound frequencies lead to higher retention on TikTok. It doesn’t need soul. Just signals.
And when you reduce taste to the ability to detect what others will likely appreciate, it becomes... measurable. Trainable. Automatable.
You think you're expressing individuality, but you're just placing bets on cultural stock with predictable return.
You think your curation is rare, but the algorithm's faster—and already simulating it.
But in Taste is the New Intelligence, the frame shifts.
Here, the author isn't concerned with whether AI can copy your aesthetic decisions. They're asking something deeper:
“Taste is how you organize your inner world. What you let in. What you keep out.”
It’s not about what you consume. It’s about what you refuse to.
Not what you create—but what you consciously decide not to amplify.
And that reframing is profound.
Because in today’s economy of clicks and virality, the real mark of taste isn’t creation. It’s refusal.
“It means not participating in every viral moment. Not reposting just because something is trending.
It means opting out of the noise.”
This is where it hits.
Because modern platforms aren’t neutral. They teach you to crave.
TikTok teaches you to chase dopamine.
Instagram teaches you to compare.
𝕏 teaches you to perform.
Taste teaches you to stop. To ignore. To abstain.
The point isn’t whether AI can imitate your aesthetic preferences.
The point is whether you still know how to say no.
If we redefine taste as selective attention, then it's no longer a status marker—it becomes an operating system.
Not a moat. A mental filter.
Because as language models become better at mimicking your preferences—and as trend cycles compress into seconds—what’s scarce isn’t taste. It’s discernment.
“We used to equate intelligence with how much someone knew. The smartest person in the room was the one with the most information. That model no longer applies.”
Today, knowing less might be the point.
The new intelligence is about ignoring the noise. About choosing what not to consume.
Knowing when to mute. When to disengage. When not to offer a take.
That’s not algorithmic. That’s human.
So let’s get honest.
Taste is not your ability to spot the next cool artist. It’s not your cinematic vocabulary. It’s not your curated bookshelf.
Taste is:
The content you don’t share.
The topic you don’t comment on.
The moment you choose to exit the discourse.
And most importantly:
“Taste is a responsibility. It’s not just about what you like—it’s about what you allow in.”
What voices do you permit to shape your attention span?
What visual language do you let color your mental space?
What cycles do you opt out of, not because you're unaware — but because you’re uninterested?
You’re not just curating your feed. You’re curating your nervous system.
That’s why, in the age of AI, taste is no longer a cultural trophy—it’s a boundary.
Not something you show off.
Something you live inside.
Not a wall to keep AI out.
A door you close, carefully, on what gets to enter.
You thought taste was a moat.
It’s not.
It’s a filter.
And the discipline to maintain it?
That’s the new intelligence.