Ira Glass once described this moment where our taste develops faster than our technical abilities. We know what’s good, but we can’t yet create it ourselves. A gap that creates frustration, but it also drives us to continued practice. I’ve been thinking about how this plays out in our AI era, where the technical gap is closing rapidly, but something else remains distinctly ours.
As Andrea Grigsby put it perfectly: AI can simulate our tools, but it can’t reach our taste. The algorithms can master technique, but discernment—that’s still human territory.
What Is Good Taste?
Taste, put simply, is discernment. It’s the ability to choose between options with intelligence, sensitivity, and intent. Good taste emerges when personal curation becomes successful practice, aligning form, content, and context with precision.
This doesn’t happen by chance. It requires high cognitive standards and deliberate practice. It involves comparison, contrast, and analogy. Creating with taste means recognizing patterns, exploring deviations, and making nuanced decisions based on memory, culture, and lived experience. Good taste is intentional. But intentions need to be discovered and learned.
The crucial part is: good taste is deeply linked to who we are and what we’ve experienced. It grows alongside our repertoire of references and encounters. In times of “travel light,” where everything can be generated or suggested by artificial intelligence, our competitive advantage lie precisely in the weight we carry—more knowledge, more sensations, more lived memory.
An AI can generate a sunset in Monet’s style, but it will never have witnessed a breathtaking dusk the way Claude Monet did. Only human eyes can interpret the world through genuine impressions. If we compete against this tireless, skilled opponent without understanding the intentions of the creators who came before us, we’re fighting in the dark.
How to Cultivate Taste
Every preference deserves a justification. A good curator is always ready to articulate their choices—even when no one asks. Find the arguments that support your decisions, but don’t fall in love with them. Our ego constantly builds blind spots that hide better solutions.
Distinguishing these justifications or intentions requires knowledge, study, and practice. Just like building muscle: the best results come from proper foundation mixed with consistent effort and repetition.
Five Practical Ways to Train Your Taste
- Less is more: Add what you want, then rethink and remove as much as you can while keeping the core intention intact.
- Money doesn’t equal good taste: Avoid mistaking cost for quality. Constraints often foster the most creative solutions.
- Study what you don’t like: The art that bothers you has something to teach. Dig into it and discover what that is.
- Go beyond the surface: Watch films, visit museums, research movements. Understand what they stood for—and what they opposed.
- Always ask why: Why does this flag use these colors? What’s the meaning behind this symbol? Why do some fashion pieces seem absurd? Investigate. Concept is everything.
The Long Game
Developing taste isn’t just about making better aesthetic choices—it’s about building a more discerning mind. In a world where AI can produce endless variations of technically proficient work, the humans who thrive will be those who can quickly spot what matters, resonates, and endures.
Your taste is your signature, invisible but unmistakable. It’s the accumulation of every choice you’ve made, every piece of art that moved you, every moment you stopped to really look. AI will replicate your tools, your techniques, and even your style—but it can’t replicate the constellation of experiences that shaped your eye.
So while the machines improve at making things, we can get better at one of the most human skills of all: choosing things.
Originally published in Brazilian Portuguese at UX Collective 🇧🇷
2 responses
“In times of “travel light,” where everything can be generated or suggested by artificial intelligence, our competitive advantage lie precisely in the weight we carry”
Love this, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Nick. I appreciate it.