How Do Young Creatives Develop Taste When AI Does The Making
Nobody in advertising was ever sat down and taught taste. It arrived slowly, through hundreds of small decisions on work that did not matter much.
The mechanism was repetition. A junior art director laid out the same press ad forty times, moved the logo, hated it, moved it back, and somewhere in that tedium learned what balance felt like. The learning was a by-product of labour nobody would have chosen.
Why Taste Was Always A By-Product
That labour is the first thing to go. A layout that took an afternoon takes a minute, which is a genuine gain in output and a genuine loss in reps. The decisions still happen, but they happen faster, in bulk, and without the friction that made each one memorable.
Speed is not the whole problem. Selection is. Choosing between forty options you generated is a different mental act from making forty things, and it exercises a narrower muscle. A junior can now recognise a good layout long before they can produce one, and the gap between those two abilities is where confidence goes missing.
Judgement built by choosing is thinner than judgement built by making.
What Actually Builds Judgement Now
The teams handling this well have not banned tools. They have made juniors defend choices out loud, in front of people who will disagree. Explaining why one option is better than thirty-nine others turns a click into a position, and positions are what taste is made of.
What The Industry Has To Rebuild
Two things are missing and both are institutional. Deliberate practice that is not billable, which somebody has to fund. And senior people with the time to critique properly, which is exactly the time efficiency pressure removes first.
An industry that keeps the speed and drops both will get faster work made by people who cannot say why it is good, which is the same worry running through what happens to agency training programmes.
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