Is There Artificial Taste?

The abundance

AI can generate a logo, write a headline, build a campaign. In seconds. At scale. Without fatigue. Execution is no longer the differentiator. But can it have taste? Can it decide what is good? Can it know when to stop?

When we started the WCF identity, we knew two things. We wanted concrete — the raw material of São Paulo, the city hosting the festival. And we wanted something alive inside it. Crystals. Shells. Fractals. The logic of organic growth pushing through urban structure.

We didn't ask AI to come up with the idea. We brought the idea. What AI did was take us somewhere we couldn't have reached alone — topographical renders that felt almost extraterrestrial, concrete forms that grew like coral, textures that sat exactly at the edge between built and living. The tool followed the direction we set. But it found territory we wouldn't have found without it.

That's the distinction most people miss. AI doesn't replace curiosity. It amplifies wherever your curiosity points. If you point it at the familiar, you get the familiar back — faster, more polished, completely predictable. If you point it at the edges of what you know, it will go further than you can go alone.

The fundamental particle

Curiosity is the only thing that determines the quality of what comes out. Not the tool. Not the prompt. The intent behind the prompt.

Most people's curiosity has been quietly narrowing for years. You search for what you already know how to find. You gravitate toward what you've already approved. Your references start to loop back on themselves. The repertoire grows — but in circles.

AI can break that loop. But only if you use it that way. It was trained across cultures, periods, aesthetic territories you've never encountered. When it surfaces something that doesn't fit your categories — something you'd normally scroll past in half a second — that's not a failure of the tool. That's the tool working exactly as it should. The question is whether you stop, or keep scrolling.

Your bias is most visible at the exact moment you want to reject something. Fear announces itself as judgment. Self-censorship feels like professional standards. Both are the same thing: the cost of attempting something that might not work.

The most direct way to reduce that cost is to make experimentation cheap. When generating ten directions costs the same as generating one, the risk of a bad idea disappears. You can try what you'd have dismissed before starting. You can go further than you'd normally permit yourself to go. That's not a creative shortcut. That's changing the economics of risk — and it directly attacks the things that keep your work inside the boundaries of what already exists.

The Formula

Creative Potential = (Repertoire + Curiosity + Processing) × Perseverance / Biases + Fear + Self-censorship

The top is what you build. The bottom is what holds you back. AI can grow the top and shrink the bottom — but only if you bring the curiosity to direct it, and the willingness to stay with what it finds.

The Choice

Working with AI is a constant exercise in decision-making. You generate, evaluate, redirect. You push further or you stop. You decide when you've arrived. Every one of those decisions is an expression of your taste. And that's the point — because if you're not making those decisions with intention, the machine makes them for you. Not through malice. Through default. It optimises toward what has already been agreed upon as good. Toward consensus. Toward the already-known.

You start with your point of view. You end with your taste. The machine is everything in between. If you're not bringing the first and the last, the work belongs to the machine — not to you.

There is no artificial taste. There is pattern recognition at scale. There is consensus, optimised and served back to you at speed. The machine is extraordinarily good at both. But taste — the willingness to go somewhere before it's been validated, to accept something before others agree, to know when to stop — that requires something the machine will never have. A point of view built from a specific life. The machine will enhance everything you do. But only if you bring that first.