AI might not have taste, but does your boss care?
Taste can't be the answer to AI in a system built to ignore it.
Recently I’ve heard more and more people in the tech industry talking about “taste.” As AI demonstrates strong capabilities in many skills including coding and design, the question “What can’t AI replicate?” keeps coming up, and more and more, the answer is “taste.”
Last time the word “taste” was so popular in tech, Steve Jobs was still alive. After the enormous success of the iPhone and iPad, Jobs’s quote about Microsoft lacking taste from 1995 went viral again. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.” People attributed Apple’s success to design and taste. That’s when I started to admire good design and craft, and to learn eagerly from Jony Ive and his design hero, Dieter Rams, whose book somehow influenced my decision to come to Germany.
Fifteen years after Jobs’s death, we’re talking about taste again. But the world is totally different now. It’s saturated with the lean startup philosophy from Silicon Valley. You must move fast and break things. You must measure everything. You must be data-driven. Taste was never in the playbook. Steve Jobs cared about craft and once famously said, “A great carpenter wouldn’t use an ugly piece of wood even on the back of a drawer.” Now you’re supposed to sell a drawer without a back, because “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s talk at Stanford in 2024 is perhaps the most extreme example of this mindset. After painting a picture of a future where AI could create apps in seconds, Schmidt suggested that students ask AI to make a copy of TikTok, steal all the content, and release it. “...in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.” No taste. Just pure, brute force with zero care.
Schmidt’s vision might still be far away, but most companies have already been optimized for growth in the same way for years. The only differences are that humans are still doing the work and iteration is way slower. Designers and developers are hired to build, ship, measure, improve, and repeat.
To get or keep a job in this cycle, designers need to constantly prove their ROI (Return on Investment) in a spreadsheet. If something can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist. In recent decades, we avoided talking about taste or care because they sounded like subjective personal feelings. Instead, we were trained to justify every decision with data and tell a story about business impact. We successfully proved our value, yet when empathy has been reduced to a framework, creativity to a two-diamond diagram, and taste to metrics, AI has everything it needs to automate design.
I find it both ironic and sad to see “taste” become a hot topic in the industry again. Jobs talked about taste with pride, but this time it’s a cry of panic: “AI can’t replace me because I have taste.” If one field can be clearly measured, we can use Reinforcement Learning to train good AI models rapidly, just as what happened in math and coding. The claim “AI doesn’t have taste” means “taste can’t be measured.” But if it can’t be measured, you can’t prove the value of your taste either.
The truth is, companies rarely valued taste even before AI arrived. Taste is powerless without authority. If you must convince your boss you have taste, your taste doesn’t matter. Jobs never had to put together a slide deck explaining why taste matters. He was the CEO. The designs of Figma and Airbnb stand out not because their designers tell better stories, but because the most powerful person in the building happens to care. As Alan Cooper once wrote: “If your boss is asking you to quantify the value of your work, you need to understand that your work indeed has no value. Not at that company. Not with that boss.”
It’s not just that taste is powerless. Good taste often hurts profit. “Good design is unobtrusive” and “Good design is honest” are two principles from Dieter Rams and they reflect good taste, but they’ll fail badly if you measure them against engagement. The entire attention economy is built on violating principles like this. You may think good taste keeps you valuable in the AI era, but in most tech companies, it’s a liability.
I still believe in taste. I just don’t think taste is the answer to AI in a system built to ignore it. (I also think AI can develop taste eventually, but that’s another conversation.) Last year, I watched Jony Ive’s conversation with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. It was the first time in years I heard someone in tech unapologetically talk about care rather than metrics and how people could sense carelessness. Care, or taste, is important even when it can’t be easily measured. If an industry shaping everyone’s life always needs data to justify taste and care, humanity is hopeless. Perhaps it’s better that AI replaces us.