Why taste, not tech, will be the advantage in the age of AI
AI is everywhere, but creativity isn’t about volume or efficiency — it’s about making choices. As the world is flooded with content, the real edge is taste.
There’s a familiar kind of panic that comes with new technology, especially when it feels like it threatens something uniquely human.
We saw it when photography emerged. Surely, painting was over. When synthesisers arrived, real musicianship was doomed. And now, here we are with AI, having the same debate about creativity.
But if we’re so afraid of losing our edge — our ingenuity, our creative humanity — we first need to define what it is we fear losing. We need a sober understanding of what human creativity actually is. I quite like Margaret Boden’s seminal take, which argues it comes in three forms: combinational, explorational and transformational.
In her telling, combinational creativity is when we smash two unrelated things together and watch something weird and wonderful emerge. Think fusion cuisine or, arguably, AI-generated love poems.
