Repeating the phrase “taste is the differentiator” will not benefit you

AI has a new fool’s trap each year.

In 2022, the critique was that it was just a glorified autocomplete. In 2023, that it hallucinated too much. In 2024 and 2025, that LLMs weren’t truly intelligent, just stochastic parrots. This year, the year of the Lord 2026, the fool’s trap is: “AI lacks human judgment, taste is the differentiator”.

Don’t buy into this year’s fool’s trap. As Nadia Asparouhova wrote in The tyranny of ideas, “Ideas ride us into battle like warhorses.” The people who repeated the previous critiques were tyrannized by their ideas of incompetent AI and rode to war with a foolish strategy.

In hindsight, it was cope. Some criticism was warranted, but it was cope nonetheless. Cope against accepting the ruthlessly inevitable forward march of this transformative technology.

As Tyler Cowen says, solve for the equilibrium! Don’t drag this year’s cope into your thinking. Even the most profound truth too cheaply repeated is LinkedIn-level insight.

The better question is: where does AI have better taste than me? Which areas should I completely delegate to AI, so far as to accept everything the AI does in those areas, even when it overrules my taste?