"Taste" is often mystified, but it's simply the discipline of editing—saying "no" to preserve a coherent vision. This is a key human advantage over current AI models, which tend to solve problems by adding patches rather than distilling to a simpler truth.

As AI drives the cost of content creation to zero, the world floods with 'average' material. In this environment, the most valuable and scarce skill becomes 'taste'—the ability to identify, curate, and champion high-quality, commercially viable work. This elevates the role of human curators over pure creators.

As AI democratizes the ability to build products, the competitive advantage shifts from technical skill to the ability to appeal to human emotion and aesthetics. Having 'good taste'—knowing what will resonate with people—becomes a crucial differentiator for attracting and retaining customers.

As AI commoditizes execution and intellectual labor, the only remaining scarce human skill will be judgment: the wisdom to know what to build, why, and for whom. This shifts economic value from effort and hard work to discernment and taste.

The flood of AI-generated assets isn't a new problem but an amplification of an old one. It simply highlights that much of human-created content was already mediocre. AI removes resource barriers to production, making "taste" and "quality judgment" the true differentiators—skills that are now more valuable than ever.

Threads' Head, Connor Hayes, predicts that as AI generates infinite content, "taste"—the human ability to curate, select, and refine the best outputs—will become the critical differentiator. This applies both to creating compelling content and to training superior AI models with high-quality, hand-selected data sets.

As AI transforms intelligence into a cheap utility, the competitive advantage is no longer knowing the most. Instead, value lies in discernment: applying creativity, judgment, taste, and ethics. The critical skill becomes identifying what truly matters, making wisdom more valuable than raw information.

The concept of "taste" is demystified as the crucial human act of defining boundaries for what is good or right. An LLM, having seen everything, lacks opinion. Without a human specifying these constraints, AI will only produce generic, undesirable output—or "AI slop." The creator's opinion is the essential ingredient.

AI can generate output, but it cannot discern what is truly 'good.' To create high-quality, differentiated content, humans must cultivate their own sense of taste by actively consuming excellent writing and journalism. This discernment is the key human advantage over automation.