The Rise of the Taste Director

The internet has spent the last two years asking whether AI is going to replace creatives.

Which feels a bit like asking whether the invention of the camera replaced having an eye for photography.

No.

It just gave a lot more people cameras.

That's what's actually happening.

Everyone suddenly has access to extraordinary creative horsepower. Strategy decks. Brand campaigns. Mood boards. Product names. Storyboards. Copy. Visuals. Entire presentations. Pick a model, type a sentence, and twenty seconds later you've got enough ideas to fill a quarterly planning meeting.

It's incredible.

It's also creating an entirely new problem.

Everything is starting to look suspiciously good.

And suspiciously similar.

We've entered the era of premium average.

The typography is clean.

The copy is competent.

The visuals are polished.

The thinking?

That's where things get a little... beige.

There's an old saying that good taste is knowing what to leave out.

AI has absolutely no problem putting everything in.

The more I use these tools, the less convinced I am that the competitive advantage is making things.

Making is becoming table stakes.

Choosing is becoming the job.

Steve Jobs once said, "Simple can be harder than complex."

I'd argue curation is about to become harder than creation.

Because creation is getting cheaper by the week.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI is democratizing execution much faster than it's democratizing judgment.

Those are different muscles.

One can be trained on billions of tokens.

The other gets built from living an actual life.

Taste comes from embarrassing presentations.

From campaigns that bombed.

From watching real customers ignore the thing everyone in the conference room loved.

From stealing a great idea from architecture, another from fashion, and another from a conversation you overheard waiting for coffee.

Taste is weird.

It's irrational.

It's emotional.

It's wonderfully difficult to explain.

Which is exactly why it's becoming valuable.

For years, marketing rewarded people who could make.

Make the deck.

Make the logo.

Make the video.

Make the campaign.

Now AI makes.

The question is...

Who decides whether it's worth making in the first place?

I have a hunch every major marketing organization quietly creates a new role over the next few years.

Not because HR writes a job description.

Because reality demands it.

Call them a Taste Director.

A Creative Curator.

A Brand Editor.

I honestly don't care.

Someone has to be responsible for protecting a point of view when the machines are perfectly capable of generating ten thousand versions of "pretty good."

Because "pretty good" has become infinite.

And that's terrible news for brands.

The brands we'll remember won't be the ones that produced the most content.

They'll be the ones that had the courage to delete 99% of it.

Here's the irony nobody talks about.

AI isn't making creativity less valuable.

It's making discernment absurdly valuable.

Everyone gets a Stradivarius.

Very few people know how to play it.

Or maybe a better metaphor...

Everyone just got a Michelin kitchen.

That doesn't make everyone a chef.

As intelligence becomes abundant, the bottleneck shifts.

Not to prompts.

Not to pixels.

Not to production.

To taste.

The future belongs to the people who know the difference between something that works...

...and something people will still be talking about six months from now.