Four words we keep mixing up
Style, taste, vanguard, and imagination get used as if they were the same thing. Telling them apart shows exactly where AI helps and where it cannot.
Four words get mixed together: style, taste, vanguard, and imagination.
AI tools keep telling us to develop taste. The advice points in a useful direction. But the word is doing too much work.
Four words get mixed together: style, taste, vanguard, and imagination. They are not the same. Telling them apart makes the advice usable.
Style is a set of rules that work together. Swiss type, Dutch grids, the look of a fintech app. Each one is a settled grammar. AI is good at working inside a style. You can ask for one and get it.
Taste is the act of choosing. You look at a brief and pick which style fits. You judge whether something fits, exaggerates, or clashes. AI can also do a decent version of this. It can pick a reasonable palette for a layout.
AI handles style and most of taste. It cannot make a vanguard or hold.
Four words get mixed together: style, taste, vanguard, and imagination.
Swiss type, Dutch grids, the look of a fintech app.
You judge whether something fits, exaggerates, or clashes.
Vanguard is new work that breaks the current rules. It comes from people living something first: a street scene, a subculture, a feeling that has no name yet. It is new before culture has a word for it.
Imagination is holding a clear picture of something before it exists. Not a vague mood. A specific picture you can act on.
Here is the part that matters for your job. AI can handle style and most of taste. It cannot make a vanguard. It cannot hold a picture that the culture has not produced yet.
So when the tools say to develop your taste, they are pointing at the right place. They are just using the wrong word. The real value sits in vanguard and imagination.
Swiss type, Dutch grids, the look of a fintech app.
AI handles style and most of taste. It cannot make a vanguard or hold an image culture has not produced yet.
Style, taste, vanguard, and imagination get used as if they were the same thing. Telling them apart shows exactly where AI helps and where it cannot.
This is the short version. Read the full-length essay, “Imagination is still a superpower”.
This issue is part of Everybody's Smart, a newsletter on taste, judgment, AI, culture, cognition, and the future of professional work. New issues every 2 to 3 weeks, free on LinkedIn.
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