You published a piece worth reading. The argument: as AI handles the technical execution, the real differentiator becomes taste. The director metaphor. Vision over operation.
Not wrong.
But there's a word in there doing a lot of unexamined work.
Taste.
McDonald's has taste. Billions of people go back. Consistently. Globally. That's not accident — that's taste operating at industrial scale, optimized for zero friction and guaranteed return visits. It works. It satisfies something real.
Paul Bocuse also had taste. Built over decades of cooking the wrong version of things until the right version stopped being a decision and became a physical fact. You don't choose that the sauce is right. It tells you. Usually after it's told you to go fuck yourself a few hundred times first.
These are not the same thing.
And here's why it matters right now: AI is an extraordinary McDonald's accelerant. Pattern recognition at scale. Familiar-but-fresh on demand. If your taste is calibrated to what lands — what scratches the itch people already know they have — generative tools will make you prolific, consistent, and probably successful by every available metric.
Billions served.
The other kind of taste — the kind that knows something is right because it resists easy reproduction — that one was built in friction. In the instrument that fought back. In the failed versions that stayed failed long enough to teach you something. In the years it took before you stopped second-guessing yourself and started second-guessing the work.
That's not nostalgia for suffering. It's structural. Bocuse-level discrimination was forged in exactly the resistance that AI removes.
So yes, taste becomes the differentiator. But the question the piece steps around is the only one worth asking:
What trained yours?
Approval or resistance. What landed or what was right.
Those produce completely different directors. And right now, while everyone's busy becoming one, it might be worth knowing which kind you're turning into.
Interesting point but physical taste is more quantitative than artistic taste. A phrase I heard long ago when commenting on artistic taste was this. "His taste is in his mouth."
Apples to oranges here. The chef is mixing ingredients to create the desired taste. "A little more salt please." Using too much salt is universally considered inedible.
A director begins with taste in an artistic vision that is subjective and not quantifiable. They use "ingredients" to manifest artistic vision which will or will not resonate with the audience on a subjective level.
The MacDonald's recipe is reproducible, hence billions sold. Filmmaking "recipes" don't work the same way. If they did one could predictably produce blockbuster movies every time.
This is something that I write about too.
AI slop can be thought of as creating without a vision, without internal guidance, without a sense of taste.
With technical limitations gone those with vision and a willingness to explore are redefining artistry.
100% well said!
Let's make a ruckus, like Seth Godin says🤜🏾🤛🏾
That guy’s a marketing genius.
He is. I love his ideas 💡
What Kind of Taste?
You published a piece worth reading. The argument: as AI handles the technical execution, the real differentiator becomes taste. The director metaphor. Vision over operation.
Not wrong.
But there's a word in there doing a lot of unexamined work.
Taste.
McDonald's has taste. Billions of people go back. Consistently. Globally. That's not accident — that's taste operating at industrial scale, optimized for zero friction and guaranteed return visits. It works. It satisfies something real.
Paul Bocuse also had taste. Built over decades of cooking the wrong version of things until the right version stopped being a decision and became a physical fact. You don't choose that the sauce is right. It tells you. Usually after it's told you to go fuck yourself a few hundred times first.
These are not the same thing.
And here's why it matters right now: AI is an extraordinary McDonald's accelerant. Pattern recognition at scale. Familiar-but-fresh on demand. If your taste is calibrated to what lands — what scratches the itch people already know they have — generative tools will make you prolific, consistent, and probably successful by every available metric.
Billions served.
The other kind of taste — the kind that knows something is right because it resists easy reproduction — that one was built in friction. In the instrument that fought back. In the failed versions that stayed failed long enough to teach you something. In the years it took before you stopped second-guessing yourself and started second-guessing the work.
That's not nostalgia for suffering. It's structural. Bocuse-level discrimination was forged in exactly the resistance that AI removes.
So yes, taste becomes the differentiator. But the question the piece steps around is the only one worth asking:
What trained yours?
Approval or resistance. What landed or what was right.
Those produce completely different directors. And right now, while everyone's busy becoming one, it might be worth knowing which kind you're turning into.
Interesting point but physical taste is more quantitative than artistic taste. A phrase I heard long ago when commenting on artistic taste was this. "His taste is in his mouth."
Apples to oranges here. The chef is mixing ingredients to create the desired taste. "A little more salt please." Using too much salt is universally considered inedible.
A director begins with taste in an artistic vision that is subjective and not quantifiable. They use "ingredients" to manifest artistic vision which will or will not resonate with the audience on a subjective level.
The MacDonald's recipe is reproducible, hence billions sold. Filmmaking "recipes" don't work the same way. If they did one could predictably produce blockbuster movies every time.