First it was craft. Then creativity. Now taste.

Rick Rubin – The confidence I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.

The creative industry seems to have found its comfort word for 2026: It's "taste".

The logic goes like this: AI can now do the execution. It creates the assets, writes the copy, builds the layouts. So the thing that separates good work from slop must be the one thing the machine doesn't have: taste.

At Cannes it was everywhere. And I get it. It's reassuring. But I think we're telling ourselves a story. Because taste isn't a gift. It's a trained muscle. Years of looking, choosing, being wrong, adjusting. And anything that can be trained can be taught.

You can train a model to write like Hemingway. Why couldn't you train it to have taste like Rick Rubin? Once a machine can create everything, learning what to leave out is only the next step. So no – taste won't save us.

But AI probably won't destroy us either. Advertising has been declared dead many times before. It never happens quite like that. The technology changes. The industry adapts. And we invent a new word for whatever still makes us feel indispensable. First it was craft. Then creativity. Now taste.

I'm already curious when AI takes this bastion too and what we'll come up with then.