Is taste something you can learn?

A colleague asked me if I thought taste was a skill people can build.

The elephant in the room is AI. A lot of people are saying taste is going to be the big differentiator between human and AI work.

If you can’t develop taste, then it’s some innate quality that people are born with. It’s gifted to some people but not others. I don’t find that to be a very satisfying answer so I started thinking about it.

Taste can’t be good or bad because taste is subjective. It’s contextual. Taste is only good if other people think it’s good. Taste is only bad if other people think it’s bad.

So, to me taste is the ability to create or curate something that people think is good.

But, people doesn’t mean everybody and it can mean yourself.

To me, it’s about making decisions aligned with a set of values. It’s more care and consistency than some god gifted ability. And, yes, practice using your taste and it will improve.

But still, there is a factor out of your control.

You have to want to improve your taste. And not everybody is going to see the value in it. Not everyone is going to have some drive to build better taste.

Building taste involves looking how how aesthetics and experiences align to values. Trying to do this and seeing how it succeeds and fails. Understanding your own values and preferences. Studying other people’s work.

It’s iterative and subjective. There’s no measurement. There’s no shortcut.

Taste comes from experience and study but it is a skill and not a god-given gift. The jury is still out if it’ll save you from AI though.