Cultivating taste
Summary
In the age of AI work slop, it’s not about how fast or how much we produce, but how well we can discern what good looks like. I argue that we must all cultivate taste and be militant about it.
I love some of Apple's ads. I’m also an unabashed Jane Goodall admirer. When she passed away on October 1, 2025, a few weeks after my dad’s passing, I felt like I lost one of my own. And then, Apple released a new advert, just a minute long, with the voice of the late great Jane. The ad is clearly low-budget for a company sitting on billions in cash. The video starts with a laptop on a work desk and zooms into a blinking cursor on a blank Pages screen. In the last 20 seconds, a bunch of photos and screen grabs of software flash on the screen. But it's the quivering, yet captivating voice of a British nonagenarian that’s the centrepiece of the video.
It’s not a perfect voice.
It’s a human voice.
A voice I knew.
A voice I loved.
And, if I may add, it's not some AI trickery.
In an age where AI can produce everything at a button press, it’s worth recognising what separates the button pressers. Surely, the magic isn’t in the intensity of the button press. It’s in discernment — knowing what “good” looks like. It’s in having the critical eye that doesn’t rejoice the moment AI generates an output, but when we shape that output into a meaningful outcome.
AI is good at some jobs. It’s garbage at others. How well do we recognise that difference? With the AI bubble where it is, we may develop a tendency to go dreamy-eyed whenever someone shows an AI demo. There’s a fine line, though, between curiosity and ungrudging admiration for a technology. I want to stay curious while retaining my sense of taste.
Much like any other sense, taste is something we cultivate. Use it, or lose it. You can cultivate taste by getting really good at something – so good that you can look under the hood of seemingly impressive AI outputs and decide if AI built things right. You can also cultivate taste by appreciating outstanding work, be it art, design, music, film, code, or writing. That appreciation can help you distinguish AI work slop from useful AI outputs. You can cultivate taste by being an apprentice to a master, or even a diligent observer. Observing someone at the peak of their craft helps us build a model for excellence in that field. You can also find our own, unique way to cultivate taste.
The key, of course, is to train our palates to notice the differences that a less critical observer will ignore. It’s to develop an almost militant stance about the quality of work we wish to do and the corners we won’t cut.
It's about not giving into AI FOMO.
It's about retaining our desire to create.
It's about valuing the precise imperfections that make us human.
It's about rejecting the premise that producing more or producing faster is the same thing as producing better.
Taste matters more than ever.
I’d stick my neck out and say that Apple is at its most tasteless after Jobs’ death and Jonny Ive’s departure - Image Playground, anyone? And yet, the most tasteless version of Apple can be more tasteful than many others. Apple still makes some of the best ads. To round off my argument for today, I leave you with a never-aired version of Apple's iconic 1997 ad – Think Different. That ad, too, is low budget. That ad, too, has a voice many loved. That ad, too, retains its humanity. As should we all.
PS: Here's Apple’s ode to the man who arguably laid the foundation of taste at Cupertino.
PPS: As a departure from my recent workflow, I used no AI when producing this blog post.