AI Won't Replace Taste

The conversation about AI in design has largely been about capability: what can it generate, how fast, at what quality. Those are important questions, but they miss the more interesting one: who decides what's worth generating in the first place?

Generative AI is extraordinarily good at producing plausible output. Give it a brief and it will return something that looks like design. The surface is right. The craft is improving rapidly. But plausibility is not the same as quality, and it is very far from the same as taste.

Taste — the ability to look at a set of options and identify which one is right, not just which one is good — is a human function that generative tools do not replicate. It requires context that lives outside the model: cultural knowledge, brand history, audience intuition, the understanding that this particular shade of blue means something different in healthcare than it does in finance.

We use AI tools in production. They accelerate the mechanical parts of design — generating variations, resizing assets, roughing out layouts. But the creative judgment, the curation, the editing — that stays human.

The studios that thrive in the AI era won't be the ones that produce the most output. They'll be the ones whose taste is most reliably excellent. Speed is commoditised. Judgment is not.