It reported on the rules brands are now setting around AI in customer-facing work. Canva's own research found 97% of marketing leaders use AI in their daily creative work, and 99% plan to spend more on it this year. Unilever produced more than 100 assets across 10 setups in three days. Hilton avoided reshooting 700 properties. The efficiency is real and it is not going away.
Then, halfway down, the line that actually matters. Koia's marketing lead pointed out that if every company uses the same tools, they end up with the same fonts, the same aesthetics, and eventually the same jokes. She called it sameness, and said it dilutes the brand's real message.
Bitcoin has had that problem since long before anyone typed a prompt.
Walk the floor at any Bitcoin conference. Orange. Black. A grid. A hexagon. Monospaced type doing the heavy lifting of implying rigour. Copy that patiently explains self-custody to people who already understand self-custody. The convergence was total before AI arrived. What AI has done is make that output free to produce at volume, which means the gap between a company with a point of view and a company without one is about to become the only gap anyone can see.
That is the argument. Taste is the last moat, and almost nobody in this industry is defending it.
This is not a new pattern, just a newly urgent one. Every era in which production got cheap ended up rewarding the people who could choose. Cheap photography produced the picture editor.
Cheap printing produced the magazine editor, and Diana Vreeland, who could not shoot, could not sew and could not design, but could look at forty things and know which one was alive. Recorded music produced the A&R man, and eventually Rick Rubin, whose entire commercial value rests on not playing an instrument and knowing exactly what to remove. Every one of those roles is a refusal engine. The scarce skill was never making. It was declining to make.
We are now at the cheapest production moment in history, and this industry's instinct has been to make more of it.
Here is the part most people get wrong. Taste is not aesthetics. It is not whether the deck looks nice. Taste is an accumulated set of judgements about what matters, applied consistently enough that other people can predict you. That is why Bitcoin companies with genuinely good designers still look identical to one another. They bought craft. They never built judgement.
A model cannot do this for you, and not because it is insufficiently clever. A model is built to produce the most probable next thing. Taste is the willingness to produce the least probable defensible thing and put your name on it. Those are opposite operations. The better the models get, the more precisely they will deliver the average, and the more valuable it becomes to sit anywhere other than the average.