TL;DR: AI has made production cheap — anyone can generate a hundred layouts, logos, or copy variations in minutes. That shifts the scarce skill from making to choosing. Taste, the ability to know which option is genuinely good and why, is now a designer's most valuable and defensible asset.

Why does taste matter more now?

When options were expensive to produce, skill showed up in production. Now that AI generates options for free, the bottleneck is judgment — sorting the good from the plausible-but-wrong. The person who can reliably pick and refine the right direction wins.

What is "taste" in design, concretely?

It's not a vague aesthetic gift. It's a trained sense for what serves the user and the goal: the right hierarchy, the honest amount of friction, the detail that builds trust, the option that converts without manipulating. Taste is judgment grounded in experience and outcomes.

Can you develop taste?

Yes — it's a skill, not a gift. You build it by studying great work closely, shipping real products, watching how users actually behave, and getting honest feedback. Volume of deliberate practice, not talent, is what compounds.

Why AI raises the bar instead of lowering it

AI gives everyone the same raw output, so generic work becomes worthless overnight. What separates designers now is the judgment layered on top — the editing, the taste, the decision about what's actually worth shipping. AI doesn't replace that; it makes it the whole job.

FAQ

Isn't taste subjective? Partly — but in product design it's anchored to real outcomes like clarity, trust, and conversion, which makes it teachable and defensible.

Will AI eventually have taste? It can mimic patterns, but deciding what's worth building for real people remains human judgment.

Carlos Lastres is an Apple Design Award–winning product designer and software engineer in Tokyo who works hands-on with AI tools to design conversion-focused products.