AI Is Making Human Taste More Valuable, Not Less
One of the biggest questions surrounding artificial intelligence is whether it will replace human creativity. It’s a question I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the past year while researching human-AI collaboration for my master’s thesis.
But the more I read, interviewed people, and reflected on how AI is actually being used, the more I found myself thinking that perhaps we’re asking the wrong question.
Generative AI has made it remarkably easy to produce ideas. Within seconds, it can generate marketing campaigns, product names, business strategies, social media posts, presentations, and countless variations of the same concept. For many creative tasks, generating ideas is no longer the difficult part.
One of the most interesting observations from my research was that participants rarely described AI as replacing their creativity. Rather, they used it to expand the number of possibilities available to them. AI became a brainstorming partner, helping them explore ideas they may not have considered on their own. But while AI could generate possibilities, it couldn’t decide which ones were actually worth pursuing.
That responsibility always remained with the human. In many ways, AI has shifted the creative bottleneck from generating ideas to evaluating them. I think this is where something much more difficult to define becomes increasingly valuable: taste.
When I say taste, I don’t simply mean knowing what looks aesthetically pleasing. I mean the ability to recognise which ideas resonate, which feel authentic, which align with a brand’s identity, and which have the potential to connect with people. It’s a combination of experience, curiosity, empathy, cultural awareness, and intuition. It’s built over years of observing the world, making decisions, and learning from both successes and failures.
AI can recognise patterns from the past remarkably well. But recognising what has worked before isn’t necessarily the same as recognising what people will care about next. I don’t think this applies only to marketing.
Whether we’re talking about branding, product development, music, film, design, journalism, or even leadership, AI is making it easier than ever to generate options. As a result, the competitive advantage is increasingly shifting towards the people who can evaluate those options thoughtfully.
This is also why I find conversations about AI replacing artists, musicians, authors, and filmmakers so important. While AI is becoming increasingly capable of generating creative outputs, I think many people are ultimately looking for something more than technically competent work.
We are drawn to stories because they reflect human experiences. We listen to music because it expresses emotions someone has lived through. We read books because we’re interested in another person’s perspective on the world.
People don’t just consume creative work because it’s well produced. They connect with it because there’s another human being behind it.
The more capable AI becomes at generating ideas, the more valuable human judgment, perspective, and taste become. If everyone has access to the same technology, then the technology itself is unlikely to become the competitive advantage. Instead, it will be the people who know which ideas to pursue, which to discard, and how to transform a good idea into one that genuinely resonates.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve taken away from my research. AI isn’t replacing the need for human creativity, it is changing where our creativity matters most.