Skill Doesn’t Win
Taste Does
Skill used to decide who mattered.
If you could write better, design better, code better, or analyze better than most people, you had leverage.
That era is ending.
AI made execution cheap.
Millions of people can now produce work that would have required years of training not long ago. Not because they became experts. Because the system fills the gaps.
This feels like empowerment.
It is something else.
When everyone can make things, the question stops being who can do it.
It becomes who knows what is worth doing.
Skill no longer determines value.
Taste does.
Skill Used to Be Scarce
Skill once lived behind gates.
You needed training.
Time.
Failure.
Repetition.
That scarcity created hierarchy. It separated amateurs from professionals. It created clear ladders.
Psychologists studying expertise show that high-level performance traditionally required long periods of deliberate practice and feedback (Ericsson et al. 1993).
AI does not remove the need for practice.
It removes the requirement to master execution before producing output.
That is a massive shift.
Execution Is Becoming a Commodity
AI can draft.
Design.
Summarize.
Code.
Translate.
Optimize.
None of these tasks are gone.
They are abundant.
Economic research shows that when a capability becomes abundant, its market value drops, even if demand stays high (Autor 2015).
Execution used to be the differentiator.
Now it is the baseline.
Taste Is Harder Than It Looks
Taste is not preference.
It is judgment.
Knowing what matters.
Knowing what feels right.
Knowing what should exist.
Knowing what should not.
Design theorists have long argued that taste emerges from exposure, pattern recognition, and internalized standards, not from rule-following alone (Norman 2013).
AI can follow rules.
It struggles with standards.
That gap is where human value is migrating.
Why So Much Content Feels “Fine”
The internet is filling with competent work.
Not bad.
Not great.
Just fine.
This is exactly what happens when execution scales faster than judgment.
AI optimizes for likelihood.
It predicts what usually works.
But originality often lives where probabilities are low.
Cognitive scientists studying creativity show that novel ideas tend to emerge from atypical associations rather than average patterns (Mednick 1962).
AI is excellent at averages.
Taste lives in deviations.
The New Divide
The emerging divide is not technical.
It is perceptual.
People who can say:
This is interesting.
This is boring.
This feels wrong.
This feels alive.
Most people cannot articulate why they like what they like.
They just feel it.
Those who can explain it gain leverage.
Taste Shapes Prompts
Prompts do not come from nowhere.
They come from a sense of direction.
People with weak taste ask AI what to make.
People with strong taste tell AI what they are trying to make.
The difference compounds.
AI Actually Increases the Importance of Humans
This is the part many miss.
AI does not replace humans at the highest level.
It exposes what only humans were doing all along.
Choosing.
Selecting.
Rejecting.
Editors, curators, creative directors, product leads, and strategists have always been paid for taste more than execution.
Now everyone is slowly becoming one of those roles.
Whether they want to or not.
Why This Feels Uncomfortable
Taste is hard to teach.
You cannot download it.
You cannot copy it cleanly.
You cannot speedrun it.
It develops through exposure, curiosity, and paying attention.
That makes people uneasy.
Skill felt fair.
You could measure it.
Taste feels subjective.
But markets have always valued it anyway.
AI just made that visible.
What This Means for Individuals
Stop obsessing over tools.
Stop chasing every new model.
Start paying attention to what you genuinely like.
Collect examples.
Notice patterns.
Ask yourself why certain work moves you.
Develop standards.
That is the real moat now.
What This Means for Society
We may be entering an era where cultural direction matters more than technical capability.
Where the biggest bottleneck is not production.
It is meaning.
That will create new tensions.
Who decides what is good.
Whose taste wins.
Which aesthetics dominate.
Those are not technical questions.
They are human ones.
Skill still matters.
But it is no longer the main filter.
AI made execution cheap.
It did not make judgment cheap.
The people who thrive in the next phase will not be the fastest typists or the best prompt engineers.
They will be the ones who know what they are aiming at.
Taste is the new skill.
And most people have not realized it yet.
References
Autor, D. (2015). Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30.
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.
Mednick, S. A. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232.
Norman, D. A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books.
You nailed it. As an audio engineer I have already lived through the change. In the early 2000s the music industry got hit with a few whammies. File sharing made music free and advances in tech gave anyone with a computer and a spare room a recording studio. The shift was slower than AI but it felt like i lost my job overnight as more and more artists opted to record and mix themselves. Despite the crappy technical quality of the recordings, people still listened to it and liked it and the only ones who noticed the difference were other pro audio engineers.
Fast forward to today where artists don't sell their music, but instead use it as a tool to build their social media presence (which didn't exist back then btw) and make money off of selling other products to their followers meanwhile the trained professional audio engineer is gradually moving towards extinction.
In conclusion, the skill to do what used to be my job has been greatly reduced, and the ones who are thriving in the "new" environment are the ones who could see how to work with it and envision what could be done within it. The music industry still exists, people are still making a living in it but just in a different way. Looking back i see that i missed out on a huge opportunity in that change. AI is doing the same but to just about everything and I don't plan on making the same mistake twice and I encourage you to do the same.
You clocked the pattern, held yourself accountable for your mistake, you half way through already, now is to become.