Shelf Life 106: How AI Impacts The Taste Economy

Published

  • AI tools streamline creation but often remove the layered decision-making that builds originality, making human taste, experience, and intention the key drivers of meaningful, high-quality work.
  • While AI can mimic aesthetics and generate polished outputs, it cannot develop true taste or perspective, which come from lived experiences, intuition, and human judgment, making taste the defining advantage in a saturated “AI content” era.

The easier it becomes to make things, the harder it becomes to make something that has depth. 

The tools, specifically of the AI variety, have flattened the process. AI is collapsing the stages where ideas used to take shape. In the very recent past, an artist might have moved from reference gathering to drafting to execution, with each step forcing decisions and revealing taste. Now, a single prompt can bypass that entire creative arc, producing something polished but often interchangeable.