The most underrated skill in AI

Why does taste matter more the more AI can do?

One of the most overlooked skills we need to develop in the age of AI is taste. AI is able to do more and more things on its own. But one thing we as humans still need is the taste to distinguish what we like and what we don't like, and to make a decision based on that. So taste and opinion is something we need to learn and refine.

Is taste something you have or something you can train?

Having an opinion and having taste is something we usually didn't consider an active skill to learn. It's something you either have or you don't have. But that's not the case.

I'm currently reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. He points out that every one of us is creative, because we create every moment and every experience by combining what we have as external input and as internal input. Every conversation, everything, is basically created by us. And if we want to distinguish between what is valuable and what is not, we need to develop our own taste.

How do you train your taste?

The way we do this is by subjecting ourselves to as many different things as possible, of different origin. That way we can see what we like and what we don't like. That trains our taste and gives us the opportunity to develop what we feel is good for us. Especially as AI can do a lot of things on its own, it's ever more important that we know what is important to us.

Why does AI output sound like everyone else's?

When we use AI in business, AI always tends to the middle of the bell curve of its training data. It's trained on the average, so it tends to go towards the average. And in the average, there is no brand, there is no unique selling proposition and there is no character.

That is something we as humans need to bring to the table. For that we need to know what we like and what we feel is ours. We get all different kinds of experience, distinguish them, distill them through our own being and then let them flow back into the AI system.

Why does AI have to match your company culture?

The same is true for corporate culture. If you use AI in your company, the AI has a feel to it. And if you want your employees to adopt the AI system, it needs to match your culture as well, just like a new employee would have to. It has to match your culture in its tone and in the way it's developed.

It's an extra layer, but if your AI favors a way that your employees don't favor, they are less likely to work with AI. Taste, culture, subjectivity, all of this, what makes us human and takes us away from the average, creates personality. That is the human aspect we have to bring into an AI operating system. At the same time it's something we have to cultivate ourselves.

How do you keep your own taste when you work with AI all day?

I noticed this myself. When I work with AI the whole day, a lot of the things I read are AI-generated. So I have to actively seek out things that are not AI. I read, consume and make music, food, movement and all these different things. That way I rebuild and continue building my personal, very subjective version of who I am. Because that is ultimately what will end up in all the AI systems.

So I think developing taste is probably the most underrated skill currently in AI development.