The Machine Has No Taste
I want to tell you about one small moment from a call this week — blink and you'd have missed it — that I haven't been able to put down since.
I was running a session teaching business owners to build their own social media agent. If that phrase means nothing to you, picture this: you hire somebody whose entire job is your marketing. They write the posts, every platform at once. They write your blog. Make the images. Make the video. Every morning at eight while you're still asleep. And they cost about a hundred bucks a month. That's not the future — that's this week.
So I'm doing a live demo. I spin one up, name him Zeus — because if I'm bossing somebody around all day he ought to have a name — and I tell him: go make me a post. Off he goes, opens a browser by himself, clicks around, posts it. Live. A couple minutes, done. Everybody's nodding. That's neat. And it is.
But that's not the moment. Here's the moment. At one point the thing comes back with how it wants to handle something, and it was… fine. Competent. It would've worked. Most folks would've shrugged and let it ride. And I stopped it. I said — no. Not like that. Keep this piece, not that one, here's why. And I kept moving.
And it hit me, standing in that room: that little "no, not like that" was the most important thing that happened on the entire call. Not the agent. Not posting to five platforms in two minutes. The no. The no was the whole ballgame.
Because here's what that no really is. It's taste. It's judgment. It's the one thing I have not figured out how to hand to a machine — and I'm starting to think nobody ever will.
Let me back up to why this matters so much right now. For basically all of human history, making things cost something. You wanted a blog post, somebody had to write it. A video, you hired a crew or blew a Saturday. The making was the bottleneck. Always.
That is gone. I can tell a machine "give me thirty posts and a month of blogs and ten product videos," and it'll just do it. Tonight. For almost nothing. While I sleep.
And here's the trap I watched nearly everyone in that room lean toward — the same one you'll feel. When making gets free, the instinct is to make more. Flood every channel. It's free now, so why not? And that is exactly backwards.
I know people with huge followings — tens of thousands watching — making almost no money. And I know people whose stuff gets seen by barely anybody, and it quietly prints money, because every piece is aimed. It's for somebody specific, and it moves that somebody to act. A following is not a business. Volume was never the point — we just couldn't tell the difference before, because making things used to be expensive enough to force a little care.
You already know this in your bones as a regular human. Think about your own feed: it's all fine. Competent. Polished. And you don't remember one thing thirty seconds later. That ocean of forgettable isn't coming from people who can't make things — it's from people who can make anything now, instantly, for free, and never once stopped to ask whether it was worth making. And it's about to get a hundred times worse.
I've been that guy, by the way. Early on I got high on the numbers, made so much stuff, looked at a packed calendar and felt productive. Almost none of it did a thing. I'd confused the making with the mattering — and those have never been the same thing.
So when the cost is gone, the only thing standing between you and drowning the world in polished, forgettable garbage is you. Is your taste. The no. Knowing what's worth saying, and — honestly, mostly — knowing what not to make.
The realest thing I did on that whole call wasn't building anything. Somebody was circling one of the flashiest things these tools can do — the kind that makes a room go ooh — half-asking if they should do it. And I told them the truth: no, don't. It's impressive, it'd be fun, and it would do absolutely nothing for your business. Put it down. There's no button for that. No prompt for it. Saying no, with a real reason, on behalf of somebody you care about — that's the whole job now.
Let me say the other side plainly, because I won't oversell you. There's a whole industry selling these tools like a content firehose: "generate ten thousand posts, dominate every platform, never write another word." Close the tab. What they're quietly promising is that you get to skip the taste — the harvest without ever knowing what was worth planting. You can't. The firehose without taste doesn't make you money; it just makes you one more drop in the noise everybody's already learning to scroll past.
The leverage is real — this is the most powerful set of tools I've used in my life. But all that collapse did was move the whole game onto the one thing it could never automate: your judgment. What you choose to make, and what you've got the spine not to make.
To close, something personal. I've been asking where taste even comes from — where I get the nerve to look at something competent and say "no, not that." The honest answer: it doesn't come from being clever. It comes from caring. Years of paying attention to real people, watching what lands and what falls flat. Taste is just love, paying attention, over a long time. The machine has read everything ever written and cared about not one word of it. It's never had its feelings hurt, never sat across the table from someone counting on it.
The other night I wasn't on a screen at all — just sitting with my family. Somebody said something, and I caught a look on a face across the room that told me more than the words did, and I adjusted. No model on earth could've called that. And that's taste too — the same muscle that tells you which post to kill and which to ship.
So here's where I land. I don't think the gift of all this is that you get to make more. I think we've got that backwards. The gift is that the machine can finally take the tedious, soul-flattening making off your plate — so you can pour yourself into the part that always was the point. The caring. The judgment. The people.
The machine has no taste, y'all. It never will. And in a world about to drown in free, frictionless, perfectly competent everything, that quiet little "no, not like that" just became the most valuable thing you own. Don't outsource it. Don't bury it under volume. Sharpen it.
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