Taste has always been the quiet engine behind the world’s most memorable creative work. It’s the force that guided Diane Arbus when she framed a photograph in a way that felt slightly off-balance but unmistakably true. It’s what allowed Dieter Rams to strip objects down to their essential clarity without ever losing warmth. It’s what distinguishes a paragraph by Joan Didion from one generated by any machine. And it’s the reason why figures like Tadao Ando, Sol LeWitt, Stanley Kubrick or Phoebe Philo can create work that feels inevitable only in hindsight. Taste is the invisible architecture beneath everything we recognize as meaningful. And today, in an age where generative models can produce more images, texts and concepts in ten minutes than a creative team once made in an entire quarter, taste isn’t fading—it’s becoming the last, great differentiator.

For centuries, the craft of creativity required laborious production, and taste was embedded inside the process itself. A designer refined a layout over hours; a novelist rewrote sentences until rhythm emerged; a filmmaker tested cuts with instinct rather than instruction. Time and friction were built-in teachers, shaping a creator’s inner compass through endless comparison. But with the emergence of GPT-5, Claude 3.5, Midjourney v7, Stable Diffusion XL, Sora and Runway Gen-3, the relationship between generation and judgment has fundamentally shifted. A polished visual direction appears instantly. A narrative outline materializes before the writer has even decided what the piece is about. An entire design system can be drafted in a single afternoon. The abundance is astonishing—and deeply disorienting.

This is where Copy Lab takes a stance that is not neutral, not cautious, but emphatically clear: while AI has democratized output, it has simultaneously elevated the value of taste to its highest point in modern creative history. Or, to put it more bluntly: when the world is flooded with options, judgment becomes the new craft. The ability to generate no longer distinguishes a creator. The ability to choose does.

Taste is often described as subjective, but that description misses its real function. Taste is not a matter of “I like this.” It’s closer to an internal system of reasoning—a pattern-recognition engine built from experience, contradiction, artistic exposure and the long echo of what has moved us. When someone like Frank Ocean curates a sonic world, or Sofia Coppola shapes a film’s emotional temperature, or James Turrell decides how light should occupy a space, they are not acting from arbitrary preference. They are filtering the world through a sensibility honed over years of living, watching, failing and trying again. That is taste: the mental infrastructure that determines which ideas are worth shaping and which should be discarded.

And it is precisely this internal structure that no generative system—no matter how powerful—can replicate. A model can analyze patterns but not assign meaning. It can mimic style but not determine why one version resonates more deeply than another. It can produce coherence but not significance. So as AI tools become frictionless, the burden of judgment grows heavier. The creator must decide not only what is good, but what is essential, what is alive, what feels correct for reasons no model can articulate.

This is why, at Copy Lab, we place such enormous value on the sacred partnership between humans and GenAI. Because AI expands the field of possibilities, but humans determine direction. AI opens countless doors, but humans choose which room to enter. AI proposes thousands of variations, but humans recognize the one that reflects intention. The model can do many things, but it cannot tell us what deserves our attention. That remains a human responsibility—and increasingly, a human superpower.

The creators who understand this shift will thrive in the new landscape. They will treat AI not as a substitute for taste but as an amplifier for it. They will use the models the way Virgil Abloh approached cultural remixing—with vision, with context, with a deep understanding of how references accumulate into something new. They will work the way Rick Owens speaks of design, with the belief that style is not decoration but the external form of an internal worldview. And they will recognize, as Roxane Gay once said, that “writing is decision-making”—a line that now applies to every creative discipline navigating the age of AI.

Taste is not a relic. It is not an aesthetic preference. It is a compass. And in a world where the map expands every second through generative power, the compass becomes more valuable than the terrain itself. This is why Copy Lab stands firmly in its conviction: the future of creativity belongs to those who pair human taste with machine abundance, who understand that judgment is the new craft, and who see generative AI not as a replacement for vision but as the most powerful partner vision has ever had.

/Carl-Axel Wahlström, Creative Director Copy Lab, 2025