A client once asked me why they should pay for a logo when they could generate two hundred of them before lunch.

It was a fair question. And honestly, they were right about the two hundred. Anyone can now produce endless options: logos, layouts, headlines, colour palettes, entire brand worlds, in seconds. The machines are fast, tireless and often impressive.

So I asked them a different question: which one would you choose?

They scrolled for a long time. Then they said, "I don't know. They all look fine."

That moment is the whole story. Making things is no longer the hard part. Choosing is.

The end of scarcity

For most of history, creative work was limited by production. Drawing a single typeface took months. Shooting a campaign took weeks. Every option cost time and money, so teams were forced to think hard before they made anything.

That constraint is gone. Options are now practically free. And when something becomes free, its value collapses. A thousand decent ideas are worth less than one right one, because someone still has to wade through the thousand to find it, and most people can't tell the difference.

What becomes scarce is the thing that can't be mass-produced: judgement. The ability to look at a hundred options and say, with conviction, this one, not those, and here's why.

When everyone can make anything, the person who knows what to make becomes the most valuable person in the room.

What taste actually is

Taste gets a bad reputation. It sounds snobbish, like something you're born with or buy your way into. But real taste isn't about expensive preferences. It's something much more practical.

Taste is the accumulated memory of everything you've paid close attention to. Every building you've stood in and felt something. Every book cover that made you pick it up. Every bad design that irritated you enough to wonder why. Over years, all of it settles into an instinct: a quiet, fast sense of what's right, what's off, and what's merely fine.

And crucially, taste isn't just knowing what you like. It's knowing why, and being able to say no. The most important creative decisions are often refusals: the feature you cut, the colour you didn't use, the clever idea you abandoned because it served your ego and not the brief.

Why "fine" is the new failure

Generated work has a particular quality. It's competent. It's polished. It's usually fine. It averages everything it has seen into something that offends no one and moves no one.

For a brand, "fine" is a slow death. Fine is invisible. Fine is the shelf of identical products, the feed of interchangeable posts, the website you forget the moment you close the tab. When the whole world can produce "fine" at the push of a button, "fine" stops being a baseline and becomes a camouflage.

The brands that will matter are the ones that make specific, opinionated, slightly uncomfortable choices: the ones a committee would have sanded down, and that an algorithm, built to predict the average, would never suggest.

Tools are not the enemy

None of this is an argument against new tools. A good designer with powerful tools is more capable than ever. The tools can explore wider, faster and stranger than any of us could alone.

But a tool can only answer the question you ask it. It can't tell you whether you asked the right question. It can't sit in a room with a founder and sense the thing they believe but haven't said yet. It can't know that the "best" option is wrong for this brand, in this city, at this moment. That still takes a person who has looked closely at the world for a long time, and cares enough to choose.

How to build it

The good news: taste isn't fixed. It's trained, slowly, by paying attention on purpose.

• Look at the best work, not just the newest. Feeds show you what's popular this week. Seek out what has lasted for decades, and ask why it still works.

• Explain your reactions. When something moves you or annoys you, don't stop at "I like it." Name the reason: the spacing, the restraint, the surprise.

• Collect outside your field. Architecture, cooking, music, fashion, film. The most original taste comes from connections nobody else in your industry is making.

• Practise saying no. Edit ruthlessly. Cut your favourite idea when it doesn't serve the work. Refusal is where taste becomes visible.

• Make things, then live with them. Taste sharpens when you see your own decisions out in the world, and learn which ones aged well.

Standing in front of the wall

Picture someone alone in a gallery, standing in front of a wall of paintings. They're not producing anything. They're just looking: slowly, carefully, deciding what moves them and why.

That quiet act of looking is becoming the most important creative skill there is. Anyone can now fill the wall. Very few people can tell you which painting deserves to be there.

That's the job now. Not making more. Knowing what's worth making at all.