How to bulletproof your taste in the age of AI
My recent newsletter, “Out of Your Head, Into the File,” made the case for getting taste out of your head: writing it down so it can survive the messy middle of an AI workflow. Mia Kiraki, writing in Robots Ate My Homework, picks up the other half of that problem: how taste erodes when you don’t.
Her central image is the Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house, recast:
AI output is the gingerbread. You’re tired, the deadline is close. The output IS the shelter. You eat it - of course you eat it. That’s what gingerbread is made for, right? […] The Grimms buried a much smarter lesson in the early pages, before the witch even shows up. Hansel drops breadcrumbs to mark his path through the forest and the birds eat every one. He still leaves them, though. Those breadcrumbs are your taste, every little choice you make on the page (this word, this angle, this risk) which leaves a marker of who you are. The forest will always try to erase them.
What’s specific to AI is the environment. It’s now optimized to wear taste down a percent at a time, in ways you can’t feel while it’s happening, until the work you used to do feels like someone else’s.
Kiraki puts the mechanism plainly:
If most of your reading this week was AI slop (which is pretty likely given the state of the internet), you trained your judgment on machine output. […] Each accepted sentence is a small vote for a lower standard. You accept a vague phrase because the deadline is close. You let a soft claim through because rewriting from scratch would cost an hour you don’t have. […] Taste dies slowly, when you wake up someday and read something you wrote six months ago and realize you used to sound so different. You had edges, took risks, made claims, and you sounded like a person who made choices.
Kiraki gets at the failure mode that follows once taste is the only real moat left.
Her counter:
Read work that operates at a higher standard than yours. Work where someone made choices you wouldn’t have made or took risks you would have edited out. Your taste calibrates upward when you expose it to judgment that outclasses your own. […] Practice the explanation. When something in your own work feels wrong, write down the reason. The specificity of your explanation is the weapon. […] Ship work that makes you nervous. If a piece feels comfortable to publish, you probably didn’t push hard enough. The pieces that make your stomach tighten show and prove your taste is working at full capacity.
The middle one is what that newsletter was about: writing down the reasons, not just the verdict. Kiraki adds the bookends. Read above your level so your baseline isn’t drifting toward consensus. Publish the version that scares you a little, because the version that doesn’t is the gingerbread.
