Tokens Can't Buy Taste
A talk about design, development, AI, and the thing none of them can replace.
Before I get into it, two questions for the room.
Question 1: How many of you used AI today?
Question 2: How many of you think that AI could do the same job you do without you?
Interesting. So what makes you qualified to ask that?
- Studied graphic design (2011)
- Professional photographer for 5 years
- Software developer since 2020
- Three careers that have all been told AI is coming for them
- Made redundant at a tech startup at the end of 2025, explicitly replaced by AI to solve tickets
They got something that could solve tickets. What left with me was the input, the innovation, the thought about customer experience, and the cumulative knowledge built across an entire career. That doesn't live in a prompt.
So the technical work was replaceable. But something else wasn't. What do you call that?
Taste. Taste is what makes your work unmistakably yours. It is the foundation of personal brand in creative fields. And it is the one thing AI fundamentally cannot generate on its own.
- Designers study studios and practitioners they admire, just as photographers study photographers
- Developers have largely outsourced taste to their toolchain, following frameworks rather than developing a craft sensibility
Here's my favourite proof point.
Noted. So if skill is being automated, what actually changes?
AI is commoditising the mechanical layer of both design and development. Skill gets the job done. Taste makes it worth remembering.
Skill is what AI can replicate. Taste is what it can't.
The developers and designers who thrive going forward won't be the most technically capable. They'll be the ones who have accumulated taste.
A real example. Mid-build, a designer and I were working on a book collection component. Someone offhandedly suggested animating the three books on hover.
That moment couldn't have come from a prompt. So where does that leave AI in your workflow?
AI used well clears the path so you have more headspace for taste decisions.
- Speeding up layout and baseline work creates space to think about interactions and UX
- In photography: I'll use AI to remove a distracting element, but not to decide what to shoot or how to frame it
- How you prompt and collaborate with AI reflects your taste. The output is only as considered as the person directing it.
This talk was built in collaboration with AI. Every idea, argument, and example came from a back and forth conversation. The AI didn't have the ideas. It helped me find mine.
So taste is something you direct. Can it be deliberately developed?
Yes. And you're doing it right now, being in this room.
- Study work you admire across disciplines, not just your own
- Be in rooms with people. You can't ask AI who you should talk to between sessions at Process Sydney.
- Collaborate mid-build, not just at handoff. Delight emerges from the space between people.
- Small details aimed at delightful experience rather than technological prowess are the fuel.
So what's the one thing you want people to leave with?
The goal is not to dismiss AI or be afraid of it. It is to understand what it can and cannot do, and to double down on the part that is irreplaceably yours.
Creative careers are not going away. The ones that thrive will belong to people who trust their taste, keep developing it, and use every tool available, including AI, to create more space for it.
Confidence in yourself and how you make decisions is the thing. Regardless of whether you embrace AI or are wary of it, that confidence is what will carry you forward.
I need a really clever way to finish the talk that makes me sound like I am funny, relatable and not at all relying on AI for a personality
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