Taste will be an important skill in the age of AI
Advances in Generative AI will decrease the skill level necessary to produce quality results in many areas of creative work like drawing, writing, and programming. What happens when AI can achieve high technical skills? Taste becomes a superpower.
Creative work requires three ingredients: creativity, skill, and taste. Creativity is your ability to come up with novel ideas, Skill is your capacity to execute those ideas, and taste is your ability to judge the quality of work in your area of expertise.
These three ingredients can be developed at different levels in creative work. For example, you can develop excellent taste in literature without an analogous level of skill in writing. They also tend to overlap. As you develop your skill, you will also gain insights into new ideas, for example.
Generative AI will soon be able to achieve a master skill level in many creative work areas, for example, drawing. It already draws that would require a person many years of intense practice. This will lead to a democratization of access to drawing skills. However, access to skills is not enough to create great work.
Imagine you become a strong draftsperson, adept at creating art, but your ideas are crap or run of the mill. You need originality and taste to set you apart. Originality to generate new ideas and taste to filter what you show to the world.
In the same way, the work of an editor is important for a writer, your Taste will be important for working with AI. You will need to judge the output of Generative AI systems and ask for refinements, changes, or even for entirely new generations. Without taste, even with a great AI capable of superhuman skill, your results will be average at most.
Taste allows you to judge the quality of your work, but using Generative AI, it could also serve as a creativity enhancer. How could we use Taste as Creativity? We can use AI to generate random versions of something and use our Taste to give feedback for each generation, then the AI can use our feedback in the next batch of generations. Imagine you want to generate a novel, interesting drawing, but you don't have any ideas. In theory, you could use AI to generate a set of random drawings and give feedback on what you like and dislike and keep generating new images until you come up with something interesting.
People tend to develop taste faster than skill. This creates what Ira Glass calls the "Taste Gap".
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff; it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Your capacity to judge the quality of your work increases faster than your capacity to produce quality work. Someone who decides to be a writer tends to be someone who reads a lot of great books. This develops your taste, and then when you write your own book, it will not initially meet your quality bar. You can only bridge the "taste gap" by doing the work and improving your skill.
The taste gap is the gap between what your produce and your quality bar. Generative AI could shorten the "taste gap" by providing readily available skills for cheap. I see this playing out in two possible scenarios.
The first scenario is that people with good taste will be able to produce great work faster than before in areas in which skill acquisition is harder than taste development. The number of people capable of producing great work would increase, leading to a new golden era of creative work production.
The second scenario is that Generative AI will decrease most people's motivation to pursue hard skills by reducing the skill necessary to produce creative work. Since you can "shortcut" your path using AI, people would gravitate towards using it instead of the long years of skill development. This could lead to a reduction in highly skilled people. Since Skill, Creativity, and Taste work together, having less skilled people would damage the future production of great works.
Developing your Taste is a good course of action to futureproof your career. Independent of where technology goes, having good taste will put you on the path of creating great work.