For most of my career, creative skill was relatively easy to spot.

Someone could write, design, shoot, edit, illustrate or build something another person simply couldn’t. The craft itself created distance between professionals and everyone else.

AI is shrinking that distance fast.

Someone with little formal training can now generate a credible logo, campaign concept, image, video, presentation or page of copy in minutes. Not necessarily great work, but competent work delivered at a speed that would have seemed absurd a few years ago.

So if execution becomes increasingly accessible, where does creative advantage move next?

More and more, I think it moves to taste.

Not taste in the sense of knowing which chair belongs in a fancy hotel lobby. I mean the ability to recognize what’s worth pursuing, what feels derivative, what needs another hour, what should be removed and what never deserved to survive the first five minutes.

When making becomes easier, choosing becomes more important.

EVERYONE GETS A BIGGER TOOLBOX

There’s no serious argument anymore about whether creatives will use AI. They already are.

Canva’s 2026 research found that 77% of creators describe AI as an essential creative partner. Figma’s latest State of the Designer research is focused less on whether designers use AI and more on how the technology is changing the craft itself. Contra’s 2026 Creative Intelligence Report surveyed more than 150,000 creative professionals about AI adoption, workflows and emerging roles.

Whether AI can make things is no longer particularly interesting. It obviously can. The bigger question is what happens when millions of people suddenly gain access to many of the same creative capabilities.

Darlene Veenhuizen, Creative Director and Co-Founder of DASH Content Collective, sees a risk in that abundance.

“While in some cases AI makes all of us ‘smarter’ it also makes all of us dumber. To really stand out, your ideas have to be different.”

AI can expand our creative capacity while also making it easier to settle for the first thing that looks competent.

Research is beginning to support that concern. A 2026 meta-analysis covering 19 studies and 61 effect sizes found a small but statistically significant homogenization effect in human-AI co-creation. Individual creative performance can improve while the collective output of many people becomes more similar.

We may become more capable individually while becoming more predictable collectively.

That’s where taste starts earning its keep.

THE MOST VALUABLE BUTTON MAY BE DELETE

Darlene describes her advantage less as generating ideas than knowing how to edit them.

“The skill of editing or curating, which is to inherently know what to leave in, what to take out.”

That ability becomes increasingly valuable when ideas are cheap to generate.

Creative constraints used to do some filtering for us. There was only so much time, budget, film, studio access or human energy available. Now AI can produce twenty headlines, fifty logo directions or a dozen campaign routes almost instantly.

That abundance is genuinely useful, but it creates another problem: someone still has to decide what’s good.

More importantly, someone has to recognize when none of it is good.

Darlene puts the stakes plainly:

“This is where the really talented will rise, and those who rely only on executing to make another post, flyer or fast and cheap logo will fall.”

AI doesn’t reduce the need for editing. It increases the amount of material that needs to be judged.

TASTE ISN’T A PROMPT

Edmund Lam, VP, Global Brand & Creative at Cozey, describes AI as equal parts thrilling and terrifying.

“I can now prototype, or even produce launch-ready creative, in hours instead of weeks.”

But that acceleration hasn’t changed what he believes creates distinction.

“My point of view, my taste and my critical eye still shape the output more than anything else, and I think that’s where my real value lies.”

That idea gets to the heart of this.

A prompt can ask for sophistication, originality, restraint or edge. It can ask for “award-winning editorial design with unexpected typography.” But knowing whether what comes back actually possesses any of those qualities is another skill entirely.

Taste is partly a library we build over time.

Every great identity we noticed. Every terrible headline we rewrote in our heads. The album cover we stared at when we were 16. The restaurant menu that somehow felt exactly right. The designer whose work irritated us until we finally understood what made it work. The client mistake we never made twice.

Edmund describes creatives as drawing on “a deep, personal library of references.”

That library isn’t simply information. It’s information filtered through years of experience, curiosity, mistakes and preference.

AI can access vastly more references than any individual person could. But access and judgment are different things.

A music platform containing millions of songs does not have better taste than the person who knows exactly what should play next.

BUT LET’S NOT TURN TASTE INTO MAGIC

Diane Huynh complicates the premise in a useful way.

“Taste is relative. Taste is something in the eye of the beholder.”

She doesn’t see creatives as fighting to preserve some exclusive ownership of taste. For her, the more durable distinction is human expression.

That’s an important challenge to the premise because “taste” can easily become a convenient, slightly mystical word used to describe an instinct supposedly possessed by an anointed creative class.

Much of taste can be developed.

You look at more work and compare it. You make things that fail. You learn why something that initially impressed you feels hollow a week later. You become less seduced by novelty. You notice when the reference is doing all the work. Over time, you develop standards and a stronger sense of what feels right for a particular problem.

Darlene talks about editing taking practice. Edmund describes a personal library built across a career. Diane emphasizes experimentation, process and individual expression.

Put those ideas together and taste begins to look less like an innate gift and more like accumulated judgment.

That means it can be cultivated.

AI MAY ACTUALLY MAKE TASTE MORE IMPORTANT

One recent study of AI-assisted textile design described a shift in the designer’s role from designer to curator.

Participants using generative tools could explore more possibilities quickly, but their work increasingly involved selecting, evaluating and refining outputs rather than constructing every element themselves.

“Curator” can sound passive, but great curation is anything but.

A good curator establishes the standard, rejects the almost-right option, recognizes the strange idea with potential and connects things other people wouldn’t necessarily think belonged together.

That last skill is central to how Darlene describes her own work:

“My success hinges on curation: the ability I have to bring together two seemingly disparate things.”

The real skill is making those elements feel as though they naturally belong together without looking forced.

There’s a subtlety to that which is difficult to reduce to instructions. The connection needs to feel surprising without feeling strained. Too obvious and it’s boring. Too clever and you can feel the effort.

Get it right and the work appears effortless, even though considerable judgment went into making it feel that way.

THE DANGER ISN’T AI. IT’S DEFAULTING.

Edmund makes another distinction worth paying attention to:

“The challenge is to use AI to expand what we’re capable of, not just to do the same work faster and cheaper.”

That may be one of the most productive ways to think about these tools.

If AI simply helps us manufacture yesterday’s deliverables in less time, the primary gain is efficiency. That has obvious commercial value, but creatively, it’s not terribly exciting.

The more interesting opportunity is using that speed to explore territory we previously couldn’t justify exploring. Try the strange direction. Prototype something unlikely. Test five visual systems instead of one. Combine disciplines. Throw away more mediocre ideas before committing to the strongest one.

There’s research suggesting the homogenization problem isn’t inevitable either. A 2026 study found that exposing people to deliberately diverse AI personas could reduce convergence in creative ideation. Some of the sameness may therefore come from how uniformly we use these tools rather than from the technology itself.

AI doesn’t have to flatten creativity. But convenience makes defaulting dangerously easy.

CONTENT HAS THE SAME PROBLEM

Content is experiencing exactly the same abundance.

AI can produce technically competent articles, emails, headlines, proposals, landing pages and social posts at extraordinary speed. The grammar is clean, the structure works and the tone is pleasant. Nothing is obviously broken, yet much of it feels interchangeable.

As baseline competence becomes easier to achieve, correctness becomes less useful as a differentiator. The writer who stands out isn’t necessarily the person producing the cleanest first draft. It’s the person who finds the observation everyone else missed, recognizes when the familiar angle has been exhausted, knows which paragraph is weakening the piece and has enough confidence to leave an unusual idea intact when smoothing it would make the work less interesting.

That ability can be called taste, judgment, voice or human expression. The terminology matters less than the underlying skill: knowing why one choice is stronger than another.

This is also why simply generating more content isn’t much of an advantage. Abundance puts more pressure on selection. If everybody can produce ten versions, value shifts toward the person who knows which version deserves to reach the audience.

SO, IS TASTE THE NEW CREATIVE ADVANTAGE?

I think it’s becoming a larger part of the advantage, but not because execution no longer matters.

Craft still matters enormously.

You can’t curate intelligently if you don’t understand what you’re looking at. You can’t break rules meaningfully if you never learned them. And you can’t reliably judge whether AI has produced good typography, strong writing, believable motion or a coherent brand system without understanding those disciplines well enough to recognize the difference.

The tools can compress execution time dramatically. Developing judgment is harder to accelerate.

That still comes from looking, making, questioning, discarding, failing, revisiting and paying attention over years.

Diane is right that human expression reaches beyond taste. Edmund is right that point of view and critical judgment remain valuable even as the tools transform. And Darlene is right that editing becomes more important when there’s suddenly so much more available to edit.

AI can give us more options than we’ve ever had.

When everyone can make, the creative advantage may belong to the people who know what’s worth making.

Rick Sloboda is the founder of Webcopy+, helping brands turn sharper thinking into stronger content.

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