Designers Warn That Taste Is Eroding in the Age of AI Curation
A growing chorus of design leaders argues that taste — the ability to judge what is good and spot potential — is being undermined by algorithmic curation, risk-averse product culture, and AI-driven design processes that reward sameness over originality.
A paradox sits at the heart of contemporary design culture: the skill that product leaders, creative directors, and conference speakers consistently name as the last human advantage — taste — is the very skill that the modern digital environment makes hardest to develop. That argument, advanced in a widely discussed essay by a design leader, has resonated across an industry increasingly anxious about its own future.
The concern is not that taste has disappeared, but that the conditions for cultivating it have been systematically eroded. Tech companies spend billions curating user experiences so that people never encounter something they might dislike or find uncomfortable. What sounds like a utopian convenience, the argument goes, has narrowed the range of inputs that once sharpened judgment — from music discovered by chance to ideas encountered outside one's usual orbit.
That narrowing has consequences beyond aesthetics. The essay links algorithmic curation to broader social ills including political extremism, the loneliness epidemic, and the rise of fast fashion, suggesting that a decline in good judgment is both a symptom and a cause. When every recommendation is optimized to please, the palate that distinguishes the excellent from the merely acceptable never gets exercised.
Within design practice itself, the problem is compounded by a culture of de-risking. Design principles that prioritize familiarity and simplicity — once sensible pillars of user experience — have been pushed so far that products across the industry look and feel largely the same. Excessive competitor benchmarking has turned bold choices into isolated gestures rather than fundamental parts of the product experience.
The arrival of artificial intelligence has accelerated rather than corrected this drift. As AI unravels design processes and makes building cheaper than ever, the expectation might have been that freed-up time would be reinvested in risk-taking and experimentation. Instead, the essay argues, teams have de-risked further, shipping more of the same. Large language models perform so well in part because the industry has spent two decades building essentially the same websites and apps.
There is also a structural obstacle: every design decision must ultimately be defended for cost. That economic reality makes unfamiliar ideas harder to justify, even when they are the only route to a genuinely better solution. The result is a self-reinforcing loop in which safe choices beget more safe choices, and the muscle for judging what is worth fighting for atrophies.
The essay invokes Colin Wilson's 1956 book The Outsider, which examined what it meant to live outside known societal norms. Throughout history, the argument runs, innovation in art, technology, and thought has depended on going beyond custom and pushing the boundaries of common sense. The most successful people, in this view, are also the most curious — and curiosity requires exposure to the unfamiliar.
What makes the current moment particularly difficult is that the question of how to develop taste in the first place remains largely unaddressed. Design leaders are vocal about the importance of taste and design judgment, but far less clear on how someone acquires it when the surrounding environment is so carefully curated. How does a designer know whether something is worth exploring, developing, and defending when breaking out of what has already been chosen for them is so hard?
The essay does not offer a tidy solution. Its warning is that curation, presented as the natural next step in technological progress, can become a cop-out — implying that creating less and curating better is acceptable. When curation is increasingly performed in collaboration with or entirely by artificial intelligence, the human capacity for judgment is not merely supplemented but sidelined.
For an industry that insists taste will matter more than ever in the age of AI, the challenge is to rebuild the conditions that once produced it: exposure to risk, tolerance for the unfamiliar, and the willingness to lose control of the garden now and then. Without those, the last human advantage may be talked about far more than it is practiced.
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