AI Will Replace Those With No Taste

Last week, a client sent me a brief that opened with: "We generated our brand strategy in ChatGPT, but we'd like you to refine it." I opened the document. Twelve pages. Correct grammar, logical structure, no factual errors. And absolutely nothing that distinguished this brand from any other.

This is exactly where we are.

Generative tools have reached a level where they produce content indistinguishable from the average work of an average specialist. That is not an insult to AI – it is an insult to the mediocrity that passed for professionalism for years.

Over a decade in media, marketing, and design taught me one thing no model can replicate: the distinction between good and exceptional. It is not knowledge. It is not even a skill. It is a reflex – trained through thousands of decisions, most of which meant discarding something that looked right but was not enough.

When I work with AI – and I use it every day – I treat it as an assistant with encyclopaedic knowledge and zero taste. It can generate twenty headline variants in thirty seconds. But it cannot tell which one has rhythm. Which one builds tension. Which one will leave a mark.

That distinction requires something no dataset can train – a point of view.

In Stockholm, at the BVD office, I once saw a board covered with rejected logo proposals for a single client. Over a hundred of them. Each technically sound. Each aligned with the brief. But only one made it to production – and when I saw it, I understood why. Not because it was "better." Because it was the only one possible. The rest was noise.

AI generates noise with unprecedented efficiency.

And here is the point: the problem is not that AI writes badly. The problem is that it writes the same way most people write when they write without conviction. Safe phrasing. Proven structures. A tone that offends no one – and moves no one.

I know copywriters who fear AI. And I know copywriters who, thanks to AI, work better than they ever have. The difference between them is not technical ability. It is whether they have something to say.

If the only value you bring is assembling correct sentences into a logical whole – yes, AI will replace you. And it should. Because that work never required a human. It required a process, and processes get automated.

But if you bring perspective – if you can look at twenty variants and point to the one without hesitation – then AI is the best tool that has ever landed in your hands. Not because it thinks for you. Because it shortens the path to the moment where real work begins: the act of choosing.

My process today looks like this: I generate, discard, generate again, discard again, until something remains that I can begin to sculpt. AI gives me the clay. I shape it myself.

I know that one Warsaw agency cut content production time by sixty per cent. I spoke with one of the key people on the team. I asked if quality had improved. Silence. Then: "We produce more." More does not mean better. More, without a filter, simply means more noise.

The creative industry now faces a choice that has nothing to do with technology. It is a choice between volume and discernment. Between production and point of view. Between what a model can generate and what a human can select.

AI will not replace taste. But it will expose, with surgical precision, those who never had it.