The Flood and the Filter

We’re drowning in sameness. Every startup deck opens with the same “the way we do X is broken” formula. Every SaaS homepage promises to “revolutionize” something while looking identical to the last fifty you scrolled past. Every brand video follows the same emotional arc: problem, agitation, hero’s journey, testimonial, call-to-action—as predictable as a McDonald’s menu.

The tools that were supposed to democratize creativity have instead democratized mediocrity. Figma gave everyone access to professional design capabilities, but most designs now look like variations of the same three templates. Canva promised to make everyone a designer, yet Instagram feeds have never looked more uniform.

And yet, every business department still runs to their in-house design team—or their agency partners—to request creative content to save their own asses while quoting Canva and Figma are so easy and quick their grandmas could create with them. But they don’t. Do they?

And while ChatGPT and its siblings can write in any style, somehow every AI-generated blog post reads like it was written by the same earnest, personality-less, slightly-robotic-and-awkward-as-fuck intern.

We now live in what Simon Sinek observes: an age where “the editor is now more valuable than the writer.” This isn’t just clever wordplay. It’s the fundamental shift of our time. While anyone can generate, very few can discern.

Naval Ravikant has put it clearly on several occasions: “In an age of infinite leverage, judgement is the most important skill.” The operative, but silently implied, word here is earned. You can’t download judgement from a marketplace. You can’t prompt your way to taste. You can’t outsource discernment to an algorithm.

Taste is judgement. It is earned. Not downloaded. And that judgement is what separates clarity from chaos in a world of sameness.

This isn’t just about design or aesthetics. It’s about how intelligent decisions get made and felt. It’s about the difference between brands that command attention, and those that dissolve into the background noise of AI-generated uniformity.

The Case for Taste: Why Judgement Beats Generation

Everyone’s generating. You. Your grandma. Your dog. Your dog’s bowl even at this point.

But very few are discerning. Just as it’s always been.

The numbers tell the story: 90% of content marketers plan to use AI to support their efforts in 2025—up from 64.7% just two years ago. By 2025, 90% of online content will be AI-generated, according to Europol’s Innovation Lab.

But here’s what the statistics don’t capture: the delta between “made” and “memorable” is taste. Between functional and felt. Between competent and compelling.

Templates are not a strategy. Outputs are not outcomes. The SaaS industry alone now boasts over 30,000 companies in 2024, up from 17,000 just two years ago. Yet walk through any B2B conference and you’ll struggle to distinguish one booth from another. The same clean geometric logos. The same “growth-hacking” messaging. The same confident founders pitching the same “10x improvement” to the same problems their competitors claim to solve.

Market saturation? Nah. It’s creative capitulation.

When everyone has access to the same tools, using them the same way, the result is inevitable: a race to the bottom of “same-same-but-shittier” blandness.

In AI-powered environments, the advantage is no longer speed. It’s selection. It’s knowing what not to include. It’s understanding where silence is more powerful than style. Recognizing what aligns and what contradicts.

The creative hierarchy has been reordered. The editor is king. The curator is queen. The creator is... assisted.

Taste Is a Moat: The One Thing AI Can’t Fake

Sure AI can replicate patterns brilliantly. So what? Taste is about knowing which patterns to trust, when to break them, and why.

Even if AI could replicate taste, who’s prompting it? Who’s editing the output? Who’s saying no? These remain fundamentally human decisions. Drenched in and born of lived experience, cultural context, and the kind of scarred wisdom that only comes from years of creative iteration wrestling inner demons, self-doubt, mistakes, latest trends that don’t fit the business context but you still must somehow make work because bills need to be paid.

Taste isn’t promptable. It’s not a dataset. It’s a moat built from years of creative scar tissue.

Research from UCLA Anderson reveals the mechanism behind this creative collapse: AI systems naturally default toward population-scale preferences, flattening unique perspectives into homogenized output. As AI trains on AI-generated content, they warn of a “death spiral of homogenization”—exactly what we're witnessing everywhere. And funnily and scarily enough, shit that was being predicted in simpler conversations around a barbecue fire back in 2022.

Look at DTC e-commerce brands: the same millennial pink color palettes, the same sans-serif wordmarks, the same lifestyle photography of impossibly perfect homes and impossibly happy people. Scroll through restaurant websites and you’ll find the same “farm-to-table” language, the same moody food photography, the same reservation widgets. Even Instagram ads have become indistinguishable—every brand is using the same influencer playbook, the same UGC formats, the same “authentic” testimonials that feel anything but.

This isn’t coincidence. It is the inevitable result of algorithm-driven decision-making meeting human pattern recognition. When creative choices are optimized for engagement metrics rather than strategic differentiation, everything trends toward the statistical mean (read: average-as-fuck mediocrity).

If you don’t have taste, you’ll look exactly like everyone else using the same tools. And in a market where 52% of consumers would be less engaged if they suspected content was AI-generated, that’s a death sentence for differentiation. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing for the lazy ones.

Intentionality: The Invisible Force Behind Every Great Decision

Here’s the brutal truth that will make or break careers in the next decade: people with evolved taste can instantly identify work created with intentionality versus work that wasn’t. It’s like a sixth sense—the ability to spot authenticity versus imitation, strategy versus tactics, depth versus decoration.

When something lacks intentionality, it’s immediately recognizable as average. The kind of output anyone could have mustered up with the same tools and ten minutes of effort. Which makes it valueless in a marketplace where attention is scarce and alternatives are abundant.

We’ve sat in countless strategy sessions where teams present work that looks technically competent but is strategically hollow. Beautiful designs that help one see nothing. Clever copy that says nothing. Comprehensive campaigns that could work for any brand in any category. Just replace the damn logo and get the zombie-fodder machine rolling. And when asked to defend their choices, the responses are always variations of the same theme: “It tested well,” “It’s on-trend,” “It looks professional.”

Did we hear someone’s balls dropping to the floor in the background while those excuses made it to our ears?

Those aren’t defenses. They’re confessions of creative bankruptcy!

Intentionality is the invisible force that transforms identical elements into entirely different outcomes. It’s what makes one brand’s bold typography feel purposeful while another’s feels borrowed. It’s the difference between “we chose this because it serves our strategic objective” and “we chose this because everyone else did.”

In an AI-saturated world, lack of intentionality becomes exponentially—and immediately—more obvious. When everyone has access to the same generation capabilities, when ChatGPT can write your press release and Midjourney can design your hero image, the work that lacks genuine strategic thinking stands out like a neon sign screaming “I didn’t really think about this.”

Your career survival—whether you’re a designer, strategist, marketer, or founder—depends on being able to defend every creative decision with clear, strategic reasoning. Not “because it looks good” or “because it’s trending,” but “because it accomplishes this specific goal for this specific audience in this specific context at this specific moment in their journey.”

Consider the difference between intentional and unintentional messaging. Unintentional: “We’re revolutionizing the way teams collaborate.” Intentional: “We’ve eliminated the 3 PM context-switching headache that kills your engineering team’s flow state.” The first could apply to any collaboration tool. The second demonstrates deep understanding of a specific pain point experienced by a specific audience at a specific time of day.

This is why intentionality and taste are inseparable. Taste without intentionality is just aesthetic preference. It’s pretty but purposeless. Intentionality without taste leads to strategic decisions that feel tone-deaf, culturally irrelevant, or executionally clumsy. Together, they create the kind of judgement that can’t be replicated, automated, or commoditized.

The Corporate Brand Trap: Why “Good Enough” Really Isn’t

Walk through any corporate headquarters. Scan any B2B conference. Open any startup pitch deck. They all blur together. The same borrowed visual vocabulary, the same templated layouts, the same stock photography of diverse teams pointing at whiteboards while someone inevitably gestures toward a screen displaying the kind of upward-trending graph that could represent anything from user growth, to coffee consumption, to the amount of verbal diarrhea spewed during unnecessary “brainstorming” sessions.

This template-driven sameness isn’t just aesthetically boring but strategically dangerous, particularly in markets where buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders, extended evaluation periods, and significant financial commitments.

Consider what happens in a typical enterprise software evaluation. Procurement teams review dozens of vendors. Decision-makers sit through countless demos. Stakeholders evaluate proposals that all promise the same outcomes using eerily similar language. Oh, and why isn’t anyone’s messaging addressing the champions’ pain points? They’re the ones who will use your product or service day-to-day. (But it doesn’t because your messaging was too busy pitching to the C-level making ROI-boosting claims, isn’t it?)

In this environment, differentiation becomes existential—not just important, but literally the difference between consideration and elimination.

High-ticket buyers know the difference because their experience has trained their taste. They’ve seen thousands of proposals, hundreds of demos, dozens of “innovative solutions” that turned out to be variations on the same theme. When everything looks the same, intentional choices become the tiebreaker. When every vendor promises “seamless integration” and “scalable solutions,” the one that demonstrates genuine understanding of specific industry challenges wins.

Taste signals care, clarity, and competence. Intentionality signals strategic thinking. Together, they suggest that if you’ve applied this level of judgment to your own brand, you can be trusted with complex business challenges.

Lack of taste signals something more damning: this brand is not ready. Not ready for serious conversations. Not ready for enterprise-level trust. Not ready for the complexity that comes with real business transformation.

We’ve witnessed decision-makers skip meetings because the brand presentation felt “template-built.”—not because the product was inferior. In one memorable case, the underlying technology was genuinely innovative—but because the lack of intentional creative judgement suggested a lack of strategic judgement overall. If you can’t differentiate your own brand story, the logic goes, how can you differentiate our business in the marketplace?

This isn’t vanity. It’s risk assessment. Enterprise buyers are betting their careers on vendor choices. They’re not just evaluating software capabilities—they’re evaluating organizational competence. Every touchpoint becomes evidence of how you think, how you prioritize, how you execute under pressure.

In B2B sales cycles that now average 75 days and involve 7-20 stakeholders, every interaction compounds. The slide deck that looks identical to three competitors. The demo environment that feels generic. The follow-up email that could have been sent by any vendor. Each mediocre touchpoint erodes confidence until the final decision feels inevitable—not because the product was wrong, but because the brand never felt right.

Taste Isn’t Subjective. Get that shit out of your head.

Let’s demolish the most dangerous myth in creative decision-making: that taste is subjective.

If taste were truly subjective, we’d never agree on anything beautiful, useful, or trustworthy. And yet, when we watch people navigate interfaces they gravitate toward well-designed experiences without conscious thought. Most can distinguish elegant typography from clumsy lettering. Most recognize when something feels authentic versus manufactured, even if they can’t articulate why. Feel. Feel! Get it? Feel.

Everyone does. Even when you’re visibly and visually lying through your AI-plated dentures.

The confusion arises because people conflate preference with discernment. Preference is personal and arbitrary: “I like blue.” Discernment is contextual and defensible: “This blue works in this context for this audience because it conveys trust without appearing cold, differentiates from competitors who default to red or orange, and maintains accessibility standards across all digital touchpoints.”

Watch how this plays out in real creative decisions. Weak teams justify choices through personal preference: “I think it looks better this way.” Strong teams defend choices through strategic reasoning: “This approach better serves our objective because...” The first is opinion masquerading as strategy. The second is judgement applied to solve specific problems.

Subjectivity has become the refuge of creative mediocrity. A convenient excuse to avoid developing judgement, or hiding the absence of any. “Taste is subjective” is what you hear when teams lack the vocabulary, experience, or confidence to articulate why their choices serve strategic objectives.

But this abdication has real consequences. There is absolutely a floor below which creative work becomes objectively problematic. Poor contrast ratios aren’t subjective—they’re measurably harder to read and create accessibility barriers. Inconsistent brand applications aren’t subjective—they create measurable confusion and erode trust. Generic messaging isn’t subjective—it measurably fails to differentiate and provides no competitive advantage.

Taste is often invisible consensus, not elitist abstraction. The best creative decisions feel inevitable in retrospect, as if they couldn’t have been any other way. They arise from deep understanding of context, constraints, and objectives—not from personal whim or aesthetic preference.

Taste Is a Scar. Not a Style.

“Taste is a scar. Not a style.”

This phrase cuts to the emotional and philosophical heart of what separates human judgement from algorithmic output.

Taste emerges from the lived, layered, bruised, and refined set of experiences that shape our instincts over time. It’s forged through the rollercoaster hell-ride of joy and grief, contradiction and conflict, discipline and risk, breakthrough and rejection. It’s the accumulation of everything you’ve consumed, created, criticized, and discarded.

It’s the music you grew up with that subliminally taught you rhythm, tension, emotional progression. Why certain chord changes feel right and others feel forced. The cities you’ve lived in that showed you how space and culture intersect. Why some neighborhoods feel alive while others feel sterile. The books you abandoned halfway through because they taught you to recognize when narrative momentum dies, when characters become cardboard, when authors lose their way.

It’s the designs you created five years ago that now make you cringe because they taught you the difference between trendy and timeless, between clever and clear, between impressive and effective. It’s the campaigns that failed spectacularly because they taught you the hard lessons about audience, timing, and message-market fit that you can’t learn from case studies or best practice articles.

And most importantly, it’s the thousands of micro-decisions that trained your instincts: when to follow conventions and when to break them, when to be bold and when to be subtle, when to explain and when to trust the audience to understand.

Taste is the shape your instincts take after years of tension between what’s possible and what’s needed in this moment.

AI can’t simulate this because it doesn’t feel anything. It has no cultural memory, no emotional associations, no personal history of creative victories and defeats. It can analyze patterns and optimize for engagement, but it can’t understand the weight of a moment or the significance of a choice within a broader strategic context.

If it were that easy to encode taste, we’d have mapped the human brain by now.

What happens when you try to prompt AI for creative work? You can ask for “professional,” “modern,” or “engaging” content, but these terms are abstractions without context. Professional according to whom? Modern in what sense? Engaging for which audience? The AI will default to statistical averages—the most common interpretation of professional, the most frequent version of modern, the most typical approach to engagement.

But taste operates in the spaces between these averages. In the specific tensions between competing objectives. In the nuanced understanding of cultural context that comes from years of paying attention to how things land with real people in real situations.

The Reorg of Power: From Executor to Editor

We’re witnessing a fundamental reorganization of creative authority, and most organizations haven’t recognized the shift yet. Here’s what’s actually happening: the bottleneck in most work has shifted from “how do we make this?” to “what the hell should we even make?”

AI can write your emails, design your slides, code your features, analyze your data. The making part is getting solved. But someone still has to decide what’s worth making in the first place. Someone has to say no to the 47 half-assed options ChatGPT threw at you. Someone has to know which direction to point all this newfound productivity. Does that sound vaguely familiar? It’s the exact role that’s been shepherding meandering, self-stroking zoom calls.

That “someone” role—the person who makes the calls about what gets made—just became the most valuable person in the room.

This transformation is happening faster than most realize. AI tools can now write a press release in minutes, design a logo in seconds (not really, but for your sake let’s pretend they can), edit a video with text prompts (again, let’s pretend), generate product photography without a photographer. What took teams hours or days now happens instantly (pretend again). But this abundance has created a new scarcity: the ability to know what’s worth making in the first place.

AI writes, renders, and outputs at unprecedented scale and speed. But only human intelligence decides the strategic questions that matter: What not to include. Where silence is more powerful than noise. What aligns with long-term objectives. What contradicts brand values. When to follow industry conventions and when to break them deliberately.

This isn’t just about creative work. It’s about business strategy. 60% of marketers using generative AI worry it could harm brand reputation due to bias, plagiarism, or values misalignment. They intuitively understand that the risk isn’t in the generation capability. It’s in the judgement about what to use, how to modify it, and when to reject it entirely.

The new creative hierarchy demands fundamentally different skills:

• The Editor: Shapes direction, maintains quality standards, understands brand implications

• The Curator: Selects and contextualizes outputs, ensures strategic alignment

• The Creator: Generates raw material (increasingly AI-assisted)

In this hierarchy, taste becomes the ultimate competitive advantage because it can’t be commoditized, automated, or downloaded from a template marketplace. It’s earned through experience, refined through iteration, and applied through judgement.

Taste Takes Talent Too: Why Vision Without Execution Is Just Hallucination

This is where we debunk the most dangerous false binary in creative work: “taste versus talent.”

Taste is not a substitute for talent. It’s how talent gets directed toward meaningful outcomes. Taste without execution is just aesthetic masturbation. Vision without the ability to realize it is just a hallucination, no matter how sophisticated or culturally relevant.

Building something extraordinary requires the full stack of capabilities working in concert:

• Taste to set direction and maintain standards throughout the process

• Intelligence to architect solutions that solve real problems elegantly

• Talent to execute with craft, precision, and attention to detail

• Courage to ship work that might be misunderstood or criticized. Learn to take a stand goddammit!

The most successful brands understand this integration instinctively. They don’t choose between good taste and strong execution. They demand both! And refuse to compromise on either. Apple’s success isn’t just about having impeccable taste (though that’s crucial). It’s about taste applied through exceptional engineering, manufacturing precision, supply chain innovation, and retail experience design.

Consider what happens when these elements are misaligned. Great taste with poor execution produces beautiful concepts that frustrate users. Strong execution with poor taste creates functional products that fail to connect emotionally. Intelligence without taste leads to over-engineered solutions that solve problems nobody has. And courage without taste results in bold work that’s bold for all the wrong reasons.

In B2B contexts, this integration becomes even more critical because enterprise buyers evaluate more than product capabilities. They’re evaluating organizational competence across multiple dimensions. If you can’t execute on your own brand with both taste and precision, how can you be trusted to execute on their complex business challenges?

The companies that thrive understand that taste isn’t decoration applied after the fact. It’s intelligence applied from the beginning. Shaping every decision about what to build, how to build it, and why it matters.

Building Taste: A Creative Discipline

Taste isn’t a genetic gift bestowed on a lucky few. It’s developed through deliberate practice, sustained attention, and the willingness to be wrong repeatedly until you start being right more often.

Here’s how professionals cultivate taste as a competitive advantage:

1. Expose yourself to better references relentlessly

Study work that makes you slightly uncomfortable because it’s better than what you could create right now. Analyze what makes it effective beyond surface aesthetics. Build a library of examples that represent intentional excellence in your field, but also outside it. The best brand strategists study film direction. The best product designers study architecture. The best copywriters study poetry.

2. Deconstruct what works—and why—with surgical precision.

Don’t just collect inspiration; understand the principles and intentions behind effective work. Why does this layout feel balanced? What strategic objective does this message serve? How does this color palette support the brand’s positioning while differentiating from competitors? What assumptions about the audience does this approach make?

3. Surround yourself with people whose judgment you trust and who will challenge yours.

Taste develops in community, not isolation. Work with others who will push your standards higher, challenge your assumptions, and refuse to let you settle for “good enough.” Seek out mentors, collaborators, and critics who care more about quality than politeness.

4. Create something, hate it, fix it. Repeat until it’s right.

Taste sharpens through iteration and honest self-assessment. Every failed design, rejected concept, and awkward phrase teaches you something about what works and what doesn’t. The goal isn’t to avoid failure—it’s to fail faster, learn more efficiently, and develop the internal radar that prevents you from making the same mistakes twice.

5. Treat taste-building as a lifelong creative practice that requires constant attention.

Like physical fitness, taste atrophies without consistent exercise. Read broadly across disciplines. Travel when possible to see how different cultures solve similar problems. Engage with art, music, and literature outside your immediate field. Cross-pollinate influences from unexpected sources.

The best creative professionals approach taste development with the same rigor they apply to technical skills. They recognize that judgement is learnable, improvable, and essential to long-term career survival in an increasingly automated world.

Judgement Is the Only Edge That Scales

As we look ahead to a world increasingly filled with AI-generated drivel, one truth becomes undeniable: tools are abundant, but judgement is rare. And that scarcity is about to become exponentially more valuable.

The global generative AI market is projected to reach $207 billion by 2030, representing a 361% increase from 2023. Every business will have access to the same generation capabilities. Every brand will be able to produce content at unprecedented scale. Every competitor will be armed with the same creative tools, the same templates, the same optimization algorithms.

But not every organization will develop the taste to use them wisely. Not every team will cultivate the judgement to know what to make, when to make it, and most importantly, what not to make at all.

The world will soon be overflowing with “well-designed” sameness—shit for shit’s sake. Technically golden-ratio’d-the-fuck-out-of logos that evoke nothing distinctive. Inert and neutered-by-committee copy that inspires no one to action. Perfectly performance-marketer optimized, and therefore, generic-as-generic-can-be landing pages that convert visitors into users but never into paying customers, let alone advocates. Social media tomfoolery that generates “engagement” but builds no lasting brand affinity.

This flood of competent-looking mediocrity will make genuine discernment exponentially more valuable. The brands that break through this noise will be those that understand a fundamental truth:

Taste is judgement. Judgement requires intentionality. And intentional discernment is the one of those things that AI can’t replace.

It’s not about rejecting AI tools. That’s both impractical and strategically foolish. (I mean if you’re on that side of the fence, you might as well start building homes out of rocks with a chisel.) It’s about developing the wisdom to direct them toward meaningful outcomes. It’s not about fearing technological change but about cultivating the human capabilities that become more valuable as technology advances.

In an age of infinite leverage, the scarcest resource isn’t computational power or generation speed. It’s the hard-won, scar-earned, battle-tested judgement that knows what to make, when to make it, and most importantly, what not to make at all.

The future belongs not to those who can generate the most, but to those who can discern the best. Not to those who can produce the fastest, but to those who can choose the wisest. Not to those who follow every trend, but to those who set the direction others follow.

That’s where your competitive advantage lies: in the space between what’s possible and what’s right, between what’s efficient and what’s effective, between what’s popular and what’s purposeful.

Ready to Build With Good Taste?

Methodborne partners with teams who value clarity, taste, and real creative intelligence. If you know your work deserves more than just output. If you're done settling for safe, template-built, generically “good” content—let’s talk.