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Everyone says AI can't replicate "taste."
I said the same thing a month ago.
Then I watched models match aesthetic patterns I thought were uniquely human. I watched curation algorithms outperform my own judgment. I watched trend prediction become trivial.
Taste is pattern-matching at scale. And AI is VERY good at that.
What's Already Reproducible¶
Let's be honest about what AI can do right now:
Aesthetic judgment? Done. Any LLM now can write in any style once it's seen enough samples. Give it Hemingway or corporate email voice, it'll match the patterns. Show it your brand guidelines and it'll stay on-brand.
Curation? Spotify knows what you'll like before you do. Netflix's recommendation engine is better at picking movies for you than your friends are. That's algorithmic taste, and it's been working for years.
Trend prediction? Just data analysis. What's blowing up on TikTok? AI saw it coming three days ago. What's about to be cringe? The models can tell you that too.
Even "originality"? Models remix patterns from their training corpus and generate novel combinations all day. New color palettes. New architectural styles. New narrative structures. It's not magic—it's interpolation between known points in latent space.
So if taste is reproducible, what's actually left?
The Thing AI Can't Fake¶
Not skill. Not style. Not even originality.
Obsession.
The irrational commitment to work on something for years when no one cares. The thing that keeps you building when every metric says stop. The weird conviction that THIS NEEDS TO EXIST even though the market doesn't agree yet.
AI doesn't have stakes. It doesn't NEED anything.
You ask it to write a screenplay about quantum mechanics—it'll do it. Make it funny? Sure. Rewrite it as a noir? Done. But it won't spend ten years obsessing over that screenplay because the story won't leave it alone. It won't wake up at 3am with a better ending. It won't rewrite the third act seventeen times because something feels off.
That's the edge.
Why Obsession Matters¶
Think about the things that actually changed your field.
Someone spent a decade building a tool when the consensus was "no one needs this." Someone kept iterating on an idea through three failed startups before it clicked. Someone ignored every advisor who said "pivot to something profitable" because they were convinced the original vision mattered.
The market didn't validate them early. Investors didn't get it. Half their peers thought they were wasting time.
They built it anyway. Not because the data said to. Because they HAD to.
You can't prompt that. You can't fine-tune for it. You can't RL it into a model.
Obsession comes from lived experience, from caring about a problem so much it follows you into the shower. From having a vision so clear you can't NOT build it, even when it makes no financial sense.
What This Means for You¶
Stop competing on taste. AI's gonna match you there.
Stop competing on style. Already reproducible.
Lean into your obsessions. The thing that makes no sense to anyone else? That's your moat.
The weird intersection of domains you care about that nobody asked for? Build that.
The problem you've been thinking about for three years that still doesn't have venture backing? Maybe that's the one.
Because when the models can generate anything, the question becomes: what are YOU uniquely obsessed with building?
That's the edge they can't copy.
So: what are you working on that you can't let go of?
Even if no one's asking for it yet. Even if the market doesn't see it. Even if it sounds ridiculous when you explain it at parties.
That's probably the thing worth building.