Taste Was Never the Moat: The Movement Makers

Tastewashing is a term coined by creator @sammicohentalks on TikTok to describe the comforting but false narrative that human taste is the final moat against artificial intelligence — the one faculty machines can recognize but never replicate. In a 2025 Substack essay titled “When AI Has Better Taste Than You,” former Meta VP of Design Julie Zhuo put the harder truth plainly: “Seen as a prediction engine, human taste is far more vulnerable to AI competition than we’d like to admit.”

That is a difficult sentence to read if your creative identity rests on having good taste. It is also probably correct.

What Taste Actually Is

Zhuo’s definition is precise and unsentimental. Great taste, she writes, is “when one’s values and preferences are so refined that they can consistently spot excellence before others see it.” It is prediction. It is pattern recognition built from deep cultural immersion — the same obsessive absorption of references, archives, and historical lineages that makes one friend’s music recommendations reliably better than anyone else’s.

The problem, as Zhuo notes, is that AI systems can absorb those same archives. The Swiss grid alignments, the color field progressions, the formal principles behind an Enso or a Fukinsei composition — all of it is data. “If excellent taste operates through pattern recognition across vast cultural knowledge,” she writes, “then it isn’t a stretch to imagine that AI systems can replicate this process.”

This is not pessimism. It is accuracy. And it clears the ground for a more interesting question.

The Higher Form

Zhuo draws a distinction the tastewashing debate tends to flatten. Taste-as-prediction — the ability to recognize quality before others do — is genuinely replicable. But there is a higher form she calls movement making: the willingness to champion an unfamiliar or risky work before any consensus exists, to stake your reputation on a cultural bet that most people will call wrong.

Her example is Alice Walker. In 1975, Walker wrote an essay that revived the work of Zora Neale Hurston, whose novels had been out of print for decades, dismissed by the critical establishment, and nearly lost. Walker did not recognize a safe pattern. She read the work, judged it necessary, and chose to be the person who said so publicly — before the vindication arrived. That is not taste as a prediction engine. That is taste as a wager. It requires something AI does not have: skin in the game.

The pattern repeats across disciplines. In 1993, Rick Rubin signed Johnny Cash to American Recordings. Cash was sixty-one, dropped by his label, dismissed by Nashville, written off by the industry as a nostalgia act. Rubin stripped him down to a voice and a guitar and recorded him covering Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails. Critics initially called it a vanity project. The four albums that followed are now widely considered the defining work of Cash’s career. Rubin did not predict consensus. He acted ahead of it.

No algorithm takes a cultural risk. No system feels the exposure of saying this matters before anyone agrees.

The Real Human Moat

Zhuo’s ultimate argument — and the one Sammi Cohen amplifies — is that the true human advantage was never taste. It was agency: “The will and motivation to act on our values. Moving the hand to draw what the eye admires.”

This maps cleanly onto what Quoteiac does, and why it is not something that can be automated away. Any sufficiently trained model can recognize that Marcus Aurelius is culturally significant. It can predict, with reasonable accuracy, which passages a discerning reader would find resonant. What it cannot do is decide that this specific quote, in this specific form, in this cultural moment — is worth making. That decision requires a human being with something at stake.

The Enso circle, a Zen motif rooted in the idea that the mark reveals the person making it, holds a relevant principle here. The circle is not valuable because it is symmetrical. It is valuable because a specific hand drew it, with intention, at a specific moment. You cannot manufacture that. You can only choose to make it.

What This Means for Creators

The tastewashing narrative, at its most insidious, convinces creators to compete on the ground that AI owns: generating refined, aesthetically correct outputs faster and at lower cost. That is a race not worth running.

The more durable position is the one movement makers have always held — not what is beautiful, but why this, why now, why from me. Those are questions only a human being with genuine stakes can answer.

Small-scale movement-making does not require a Pulitzer or a record label. It looks like the newsletter writer who builds a year of essays around an obscure thinker the algorithm has not yet surfaced. The shop owner who carries the line nobody is asking for because the work is honest and the maker deserves a buyer. The designer who keeps the quote nobody recognizes in the lineup because the words are worth setting in type. None of these acts are safe bets. All of them are wagers.

The great tastemakers were not primarily curators. They were people who cared enough about something to drag it into the room before anyone else recognized it deserved to be there.

Explore the collections at Quoteiac — curated with intention, not algorithm.