Currents And Tides: Taste, Signal And the Creative Process in the Age of AI
Currents & Tides — Episode 1
Artificial intelligence has made it remarkably easy to make almost anything look really-really… good.
A half-formed idea can be instantly and coherently conjured into a brilliant strategy. A messy collection of numbers can become an exquisite presentation. A slightly inebriated napkin sketch? The next trillion-dollar idea. And whatever incoherent thought you had while staring into space at 11:30 on a Tuesday night can, within a few prompts, suddenly appear articulate and convincing.
Which presents founders, owners and small teams with another problem:
How the hell do you know if any of it is actually good?
The beautiful presentation might contain the terrible idea. The awkward presentation might contain the insight everyone should be paying attention to. Jim In Engineering’s strategy may sound inevitable, while its foundation is built on assumptions nobody bothered to question.
How will you be able to discern?
You will need taste.
And taste, at least in business, isn’t aesthetic. It’s asking questions:
What works? What doesn’t? What has become too complicated? What is making the team suffer? Does the entire strategy just… suck?
And the annoying part is that you can’t download an app for taste.
You develop it through the grit-and-grind process of doing…
You make decisions. And then… some work and some don’t. You hire the wrong person. Build the wrong process. Misread the customer. Overcomplicate something that should have remained simple. Occasionally, you stumble into something brilliant without quite understanding why.
Then you revise.
Over and over again.
That revisionary process is really the… creative process.
And building a business, whether we choose to describe it that way or not, is a creative act. You begin with an idea, give it form, discover all the ways reality disagrees with you, and begin shaping it again.
Eventually, through enough dirty, painful contact with the work, something starts to develop:
Pattern recognition.
Earned intuition.
And…
Taste.
And taste becomes increasingly important because AI isn’t simply creating more output: it’s creating more signal. But signal isn’t always meaningful. And if social media already made the business environment noisy, AI is going to make that noise faster, more polished and much more persuasive. Information can now be generated, summarized, analyzed, repackaged and distributed at extraordinary speed.
The problem increasingly won’t be finding something to pay attention to, but deciding what deserves your attention. Because without some internal sense of taste, everything begins looking…beautiful.
And, like all humans confronted with beauty, you will…
React.
Change the strategy. Adopt the software. Reorganize the team. Chase the new market. Implement the new framework. Respond to the latest prediction about the future of work—
Eventually, the business starts lurching from signal to signal…
Not because it lacks information, but because it lacks a sufficiently developed internal judgment about what matters.
And there is—of course—one complication: Your taste can be wrong.
Experience becomes outdated. Familiar patterns change. The thing that worked ten times may fail on the eleventh. And founder intuition can very easily mutate from earned judgment into unquestioned certainty.
So taste has to remain revisable.
Your people need to be able to challenge it. Your processes need to expose bad assumptions. Evidence has to remain capable of changing your mind.
Because taste isn’t certainty…
It is the accumulated ability to recognize what deserves your attention, what deserves another revision and… occasionally, when you need to reconsider the thing you were so certain you already understood.