People have started writing AI;DR in response to content that's obviously AI-generated slop.

Most spot it through em dashes, parallelisms, emojis.

For me, it's the absence of taste.

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Taste isn't "I like this."

It's the feeling you get when something is technically fine but somehow not right.
The ability to sense the delta between almost and actually.

Dieter Rams pointed at this with his ten principles of good design. Purposeful. Honest. Long-lasting. Unobtrusive.

Not a list of things he liked.
A standard he could feel, and apply consistently.

People without taste ignore that feeling.
People with taste sit with it until they can articulate it.

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Some businesses have taste.

Apple, obviously.
But it isn't exclusive to design-led or luxury brands.

Monzo. Dyson. Braun.

All of them made choices that required someone to say "not yet" instead of "good enough."

At the product level.
At the brand level.
In decisions nobody outside the building ever saw.

They understand what the absence of taste costs.
Forgettability. Clunkiness. Sameness.

For a growth-stage business trying to carve out a position in a crowded market, those aren't just aesthetic problems.
They're commercial ones.

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The barrier to building is lower than it's ever been.

Vibe coding gets a founder from idea to funding with next to no investment.
AI writes the website copy, the pitch deck, the go-to-market plan.

Most of your competitors are using the same tools, starting from the same prompts, producing work that looks and sounds identical.

Cheap and fast doesn't produce differentiation.
Taste does.

It's what makes a brand feel considered rather than assembled.
A proposition feel specific rather than borrowed.
A product feel like someone actually thought hard about what it should and shouldn't do.

Those things compound.
Slowly, and then quickly.

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The problem with slop isn't just that it's bad.

It's what it reveals about the judgment of the people making it.

AI removes the friction of thought.
The blank page.
The bad first draft.
The edit that forces you to decide what you actually mean.
The moment where you ask whether you've got something genuinely worth saying, or just something to say.

That friction is important.
Remove it, and you get outputs that are technically correct and entirely forgettable.
Your market has seen it before.
It's just arranged differently.

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Taste is trainable.
Slowly, with commitment.

Slow down.
Find something you like and stay with it long enough to articulate why. Find something you don't like and do the same.

Learn to describe it precisely.
"I don't like it" is useless.
The people who can articulate exactly what they feel, and why, tend to make better decisions across the board.

Go wide.
Taste is comparative.
Reading only in your category narrows you.
The connections that produce genuine judgment come from unexpected places.

Edit more than you create.
Anyone can add.
Taste tells you what to take away.

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Most businesses at the growth stage are building fast, with small teams, under pressure.

The temptation is to ship, to fill the pipeline, to move.

The ones that build something worth acquiring, worth scaling, worth remembering, are the ones where someone in the room kept asking whether it was actually more than 'good enough'.