10: On taste.

If this buzzword isn't giving you the ick - you might be the problem.

Since pretty much the beginning of the ‘LLM as mainstream’ discourse, the word ‘taste’ has been thrown around as everything from AI’s Achilles heel to humanity’s saviour. Taste as moat. Taste as hiring lens. Taste as cultural arbiter.

And, if we’re going on flavours of the year, the taste of 2026 has been ‘taste’, too. So much so that, as the New Yorker reported just last month, the very bros that we mock for being taste illiterate, have come to the party late, cash-fuelled and growth-minded, ready to commoditise it.

Still, long before this article, or the snark filled commentary of Sora’s shutdown, this discourse has gone from my comfort blanket to… almost entirely the opposite.

What is ‘taste’, anyway?

Let’s remove the assumption that taste = cool for two seconds, and boil down what we mean when we talk about it as a differentiator.

Taste is something you ‘have’ or you ‘haven’t’ - a mysterious judgement filter which allows you to see things others’ simply don’t, can’t, or won’t. It’s personal, it’s subjective, and yet, there exist ‘tastemakers’ - those who are generally lauded above the rest of us mere mortals by sheer virtue of their exquisite taste.

@curatingambiance

Curating Ambiance on Instagram: "The future CTOs might be a lit…

So taste is a curatorial skill perhaps, or a talent for anticipation. Yet, it is entirely separate to trends, or what might be considered ‘fashionable’ - indeed, taste is eternal and enduring. And while it’s not about fashion, or coverage, or accolades, all three seem to follow closely behind it. It can’t be bought but, often, it does pay.

It’s a way of seeing the world and then, perhaps, a way of creating, curating, collecting and presenting - as much about taking away as it is about adding. In fact, there is something wrapped up in restraint when it comes to taste. It’s like speaking a language that few are literate in, but once uttered grants you entry into all kinds of secret clubs. Taste is, by her very nature, a gatekeeper.

And it’s here that I struggle.

Taste is a knife

I don’t really do exclusion. In fact, at the ripe old age of thirty-whatever, I can now categorically say I’m allergic to it. As this conversation about taste started to grow and grow, I couldn’t help but notice how… haughty it all sounded.

Now, I love a Brontë and an Austen novel as much as the next girlypop, but lately the high-and-low-born societal discourse I’m reading about in my escapist 19th century lit is starting to feel topical. Except today, rather than trotting out our pianoforte skills or showing off our watercolours, the girls are… talking about how we all have to know (and sell!) what ‘tasteful’ is.

And today, just like then, this nous has measurable economic outcome. If we are holding to the narrative that, against a shift towards automation over human resource, as skilled creatives we have the last bastion of ‘taste’? We must acknowledge that the inference is: ‘and not everyone has it’.

The question I’m most interested in here isn’t the ‘why’ or ‘how’, but rather - ‘who’. Who gets to claim (and define) taste, in the new world? And who gets left behind?

“Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others.”
- Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

Get in loser, we’re enjoying classism (again)

Taste requires segmentation.

It requires a foil. ‘Distasteful’ must be established, agreed upon, and held up as example, in order that ‘tasteful’ can win the day.

And what is distasteful if not vulgar, common, even sometimes ‘pop’. The inference is always that taste rescues us from that which is ‘low’.

Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital explores how education, intellect, and soft skills like how we speak, what we choose, all promote social mobility and reproduce social inequality. ‘Elite’ culture is literally handed down - taste is acquired through exposure to cultural capital (artefacts, assets, opportunity, connections, the list goes on) from birth. By that logic then, possessing good taste is preordained.

By virtue of working at an academic publisher, I’m semi well-versed in the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, and what it meant for freedom of speech, exchange of ideas, and really importantly: power and religion. Suddenly, anyone could print anything, say anything, to a wider audience. You can see where I’m going with this.

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TRENDIE® on Instagram: "notes on taste, discernment, living hed…

Initially, that power, historically held by the church, was gate-kept through printing everything in Latin. Law, medicine, governance, economy - all were protected and understood by the Latin-literate (read: rich) class. When that changed, what remained was the clergy’s interpretive power. The inference that, just because a wider group could now read, write, and publish - there was a lack of critical thought that required training, lineage, and ordainment to acquire. They invented a new barrier.

And here we are in 2026, disrupted by technology, and in response? Unconsciously (or maybe very consciously) defining who gets to participate in the new world, and who doesn’t. Attributing merit based on perceived critical eye, access, education, and resources… again. AI just turned an already existent opportunity gap into a chasm - and we’re adding to the gulf.

Pushing up the ladder

I hate to be the one to point this out, but… if the gilets are taste-washing, the call is coming from inside the house. The great co-opting of taste has begun. I’m sure taste-maxxing experiences and pay-for-access 'taste curriculums’ will soon follow. As far as the algorithm goes, taste and technology are natural bedfellows. If taste is a culmination of input, and our inputs are decided for us by our feeds, then who is the tastemaker here, really?

There’s the rub: what we view as ‘tasteful’ work is surfaced to us, increasingly, by technology. I’m certain that there are plenty of tastemakers I’ve yet to ever encounter within a 30 mile radius of where I live, simply through not having collided with their sphere of influence. Whether they’re not online enough, or I’m not offline enough, the outcome is the same: without perception, taste counts for nothing.

The serpent eats its tail

The fact of the matter is - the ‘taste is our protection’ argument gets made most regularly, from what I can tell, by the people that were always protected. It’s super comfortable to come to this conclusion if you’re a veteran creative with 15 years industry experience under your belt, and some Cannes Lions shining up the bookcase. It’s yet more comfortable to be didactic when you’re looking at a 5-10 year runway before retirement, and the massive disruption and displacement caused by automation isn’t really going to touch the sides of what you’ve amassed.

It’s a completely different conversation if you’re 24 and in the ‘building’ phase of your career. Remember that feeling of being terrified of getting ‘found out’? Now imagine the sum total of the world’s knowledge as your peer on assignment. Or, if you were looking in at the creative industries and wondering how you could ever access them before the advent of AI, imagine the barriers to entry being impossible to perceive. How does one complete a ‘taste-forward’ interview task?

The ugly truth is: taste isn’t magically bestowed upon you at birth - not as part of your DNA, anyway. It’s a skill - learned and developed through observation, access, and trial and error. Which means two things are true - firstly, that we’re on a path that will erode years of time, opportunity, platform, and context to develop taste (and future tastemakers) from junior to mid level roles in creative and strategy. And secondly, and more disquietingly, machines can observe and learn, too. They’re great at it. So our ‘moat’ is, at best, a thin and bridgeable stream.

And now comes the part where I hold my hands up. I’m benefitting from the tastemaker’s AI du jour (that being Claude). As a co-founder of a growing business from 5-9 pm there are literally never enough hours in the day, and as someone who struggles with structuing my work into systems thinking, I greatly benefit from the effects of doing so. I find I use it rarely in my creative work, and most often as a virtual assistant/process builder, but that doesn’t mean that the thing itself isn’t benefitting from receiving my point of view, my understanding of my work and prioritization, and fundamentally perhaps even my ‘taste’.

I don’t believe that taste is our last salvation, but even if I did - if I didn’t see that the game is rigged, and accelerating an already unfair meritocracy - I cannot deny that as far as AI goes? The helpfulness is at once life-changing, and terrifying - taste or no taste. And in any arena where our options seem to be ‘participate and be complicit’, or ‘reject and become obsolete’, one has to start questioning why. I continue using because everybody else does, because increasingly AI literacy is sought out as a competency for what I do, and because, honestly? It helps. But that doesn’t shake the uneasy feeling I have every time I start a new chat:

Am I feeding the monster that is eating me alive?