How to Develop Taste in the AI Age: Study the Greats

TL;DR

To develop taste in the age of AI, consume and study the best work in your craft until you know the words for what you see. Learn the vocabulary, read the books the masters wrote, and notice your surroundings. Taste is a library of references you can name, and naming is what lets you direct an AI tool.

This post expands a 2-and-a-half-minute video I published on October 7, 2026. It's embedded below.

Key takeaways

Taste comes from consumption. You get it by studying the best work in your field, not by waiting for an instinct to show up.
Vocabulary is the bridge to AI. If you can name a close-up, a medium shot and a zoom out, you can ask a model for exactly that.
The masters already wrote it down. Disney's 12 principles of animation came out of studio work from the 1930s onwards and were published in a 1981 book by two of Walt Disney's animators.
Noticing is half of it. Steve Jobs saw a stone on Florence's sidewalks in 1985 and put it on Apple Store floors starting in 2002.

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Everyone has heard some version of this by now: in the AI age, taste is everything, and the people with the best taste are the most leveraged people in the market. I agree. But almost nobody says how you actually get it. Here's how I think about it.

What is taste, in practical terms?

Taste is knowing what good looks like in your craft and having the words to describe it. It's a library of references in your head, plus the vocabulary to point at any one of them.

That second part matters more now than it used to. An AI model can produce almost anything, but it produces what you describe. If your description is vague, you get the average. If you can say exactly what you mean, you get closer to your vision. I wrote about this from a different angle in the most valuable skill in the age of AI: building is cheap now, and the person who can say what to build gets the leverage. Taste is what decides whether what you ask for is any good.

How do you develop taste?

Through consumption. Studying. Getting more proficient at whatever it is that you do. There's no shortcut, but there is a method:

Study the greats. Pick the people at the top of your craft and look at their work closely, not casually.
Learn the words they use. Every craft has its own vocabulary for what's happening. Collect it.
Read what they wrote. Industry magazines, textbooks, manuals. A lot of the best thinking in any field is already on paper.
Notice things in daily life. When something looks good, stop and ask what it is and what it's called.
Use it. Describe what you want to an AI tool with those words and see how close it gets.

Why does vocabulary matter so much when working with AI?

Because the words you know set the limit on how precisely you can direct a model. You can't ask for what you can't name.

Take filmmaking. Say you want to make AI movies. You'd study the people who make movies, how they make them, and the words they use to describe what's on screen. Close-up shots, medium shots, long shots, zoom ins, zoom outs. It's a huge set of industry-specific terms. The better you understand that language, the better you can articulate a scene to an AI tool, model or agent, and the closer the output gets to what's in your head.

I ran into this directly when we built an auto-editor for my own shorts. "Make it look like my videos" did nothing. What worked was naming each element: the hook card at the start, the safe area the captions stay inside, the face tracking, no punch-ins. Each term I could name became a rule the tool could follow. Each one I couldn't name stayed a vague complaint.

What should you read to develop taste?

Read what the best people in your field wrote about how they work. Magazines in your industry, textbooks, manuals.

Animation is my favorite example. Disney's twelve basic principles of animation (squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, timing and the rest) were introduced by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two Disney animators, in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. The principles themselves come from the work Disney's animators did from the 1930s onwards. So the people who worked under Walt Disney left you a written manual. If you want to make animation with AI, it's all there.

Every idea you pick up this way becomes a piece of the puzzle. You can assemble those pieces, move them around, and reassemble them in different ways, and that's where the cool stuff comes from.

How did Steve Jobs use what he noticed in Florence?

He remembered a stone he'd seen on Florence's sidewalks and, years later, made it the floor of Apple's stores.

In Walter Isaacson's biography, the story goes like this: in 1985, as Jobs was being pushed out of Apple, he visited Italy and was struck by the gray-blue stone of Florence's sidewalks. In 2002 he decided the light wood floors in Apple Stores were starting to look pedestrian and wanted that stone instead, the real thing, not a concrete imitation. The stone is pietra serena, a sandstone used all over Renaissance Florence, and Apple sourced it from the Il Casone quarry outside the city. The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue has it.

So a reference from a trip he took at 30 became part of his stores 17 years later. He didn't go to Florence looking for flooring. He paid attention, and he kept it.

I love this story because it shows how much we can pull from our environment just by noticing it. And there's a side effect I think is underrated: life gets a lot richer when you're paying attention to everything around you.

Who this is for (and who it isn't for)

This is for anyone using AI tools to make creative work (video, design, writing, animation) who keeps getting outputs that are fine but not what they pictured. Usually the gap is vocabulary and references, not the tool.

It isn't a shortcut. If you're hoping a better prompt template will stand in for knowing your craft, it won't. The model can teach you terms when you ask, but deciding what's good is your job.

Common mistakes when trying to develop taste

Consuming without studying. Scrolling through great work isn't the same as asking why it works and what it's called.
Only looking inside your own feed. Jobs got his floor from a sidewalk. The best references often come from outside your field.
Skipping the old books. A lot of the fundamentals were written down decades ago by people who did the work at the highest level.
Not writing down what you notice. A reference you can't recall later doesn't help you.
Describing feelings instead of things. "Make it more cinematic" is a feeling. "Slow push-in, then cut to a close-up" is an instruction.

Frequently asked questions

Can you develop taste, or are you born with it?

You develop it. Taste is a library of references plus the words to describe them, and both come from exposure and study. Nobody is born knowing what a medium shot is.

How long does it take to develop taste?

There's no fixed number. It grows every time you study a great example closely enough to name what makes it work. Going deep on one craft builds it faster than skimming many.

Can AI help you develop taste?

Yes, as a tutor. When you see something you like and don't know what it's called, describe it to an AI tool and ask for the term. The judgment about what's good still has to be yours.

Where did Steve Jobs get the Apple Store floor stone?

From Florence. According to Walter Isaacson's biography, Jobs noticed the gray-blue stone of Florence's sidewalks on a 1985 trip, and in 2002 chose that stone, pietra serena from the Il Casone quarry, for Apple Store floors.

How to develop taste in the age of AI: study the greats, learn the words, notice everything