“Taste” got so overused this year that it curdled into the exact emptiness it was supposed to stand against. Every deck claims it. Every brand brief demands it. Every third LinkedIn post is selling it. When a word gets stretched across everything, it stops meaning anything.
Then two platforms handed us a working definition by accident. When LinkedIn and Substack both shipped features to fight AI slop inside the same stretch of 2026, they were not just tidying up their feeds. They drew a line around what taste is by showing us its opposite.
Because that is what AI slop is. It is anti-taste. It is content with the taste subtracted out.
What AI Slop Actually Is
Slop is not the same as low-quality content. Bad work has existed forever. Slop is something newer: content produced at volume with no one behind it. It is the median of everything ever written, blended into a smooth paste and pushed out at scale. It reads fine. It offends no one. And it carries no weight, because nobody chose it and nobody staked anything on it.
That is why people react to slop the way they react to a smell. You do not need a rubric to catch it. You feel the absence of a person.
I have run more than 100 go-to-market campaigns, and the difference between a piece that moved and a piece that died was almost never production quality. Both looked polished. One had a point of view and one did not. The market can feel that gap even when it cannot name it. It is the same reason authentic brand voice is turning into a competitive edge while everyone else races to automate.
So What Is Taste?
Here is the definition I keep coming back to.
Taste is the capacity to make a judgment you are willing to defend under ambiguous conditions. It is choosing what is right before there is data to say it is right, and staking something on that choice.
Read that twice, because the second half is the part everyone skips. Taste is more than knowing what is good. It is deciding what is good when the evidence is incomplete, and then putting your name on it.
Three things do the actual work. Each one is exactly what AI lacks.
1. A Point Of View
A point of view is an actual position about what is good, formed from a specific history. A specific person who has lived a specific life, not the average of all content ever produced.
AI cannot have this. By design, it returns the middle of the distribution. Ask it for an opinion and it hands you the most defensible, least surprising version of one. That is the opposite of a point of view. A real POV is willing to be wrong in a particular direction, because a particular person formed it and meant it.
2. Judgment Under Ambiguity
Taste only exists where the data runs out. Anything the numbers already settle requires no judgment, and therefore no taste. If an A/B test can answer it, taste was never involved.
The willingness to decide when the evidence is incomplete is the whole game. It is what you actually pay a strategist or a creative director for. Not to read the dashboard. Anyone can read the dashboard. You pay them to make the call the dashboard cannot make yet.
AI is built to do the opposite. It optimizes toward what already worked. It cannot bet on what has not happened.
3. Accountability And Stakes
This is the one people forget. Taste requires a self that can be held responsible for the choice. A reputation that can take the hit. Someone who means it.
When I ship something, my name is on it. If it flops, that costs me. That cost is not a flaw in the system. It is the thing that makes the judgment real. AI has no reputation to lose, so its output means nothing in the most literal sense: no one meant it.
Why This Should Scare A Lot Of Brands
Put those three together and you understand why slop lands with a thud. No point of view, no judgment, no stakes. The same is true of your AI creative, your AI ads, your AI-written landing pages. Your anything.
Here is the part brands keep getting wrong. The audience can tell.
The fact that LinkedIn and Substack built anti-slop features at all is the tell. Platforms do not spend engineering cycles fighting a problem their users cannot detect. People already know when something was machine-made. It is not subtle, and it is not hard to spot.
I will say the quiet part out loud. There is a platform in this space that markets itself as the way to “connect brands with top marketers,” and it floods every channel it touches with tasteless slop. If you are a brand, I cannot think of a faster way to dig your own grave than to hand your voice to something with no taste and no name behind it.
Use AI As The Passenger, Not The Driver
None of this means avoid AI. I use it every day. It is the fastest research assistant, first-drafter, and sparring partner I have ever had. The question is which seat it sits in.
AI should be the passenger you argue with. It throws out ten directions, you kill nine, you fight it on the tenth, and the judgment stays yours. The taste stays yours. The name on the work stays yours.
Brands that let it drive are the ones going straight off the embankment. They confuse the speed of generation with the quality of the decision. Those are not the same thing, and the space between them is exactly where taste lives.
What To Do With This
Put a named owner on every external piece before it ships. Not a review step. A person who will defend the choice if it is questioned. Use AI for volume, research, and speed, and never for the final call.
Run the swap test. If a piece could carry your competitor’s name and still make sense, it has no point of view, so start over. And treat “we cannot tell if it is AI” as a warning, not a compliment. If you cannot tell, neither can your audience, and that is the whole problem.
Taste is not a vibe you either have or you do not. It is a discipline. It is the willingness to decide without cover and to own the result. That is the one thing you cannot automate, and in a feed drowning in cheap, disposable content, it is turning into the only thing that still cuts through.
Stay tasty.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is taste in marketing?
Taste is the capacity to make a judgment you are willing to defend under ambiguous conditions. In marketing, it is the ability to decide what is good before the data confirms it, and to stake your reputation on that call. It combines a specific point of view, judgment when evidence is incomplete, and personal accountability for the outcome.
What is AI slop?
AI slop is content generated at volume with no person behind the choices. It reads as the statistical median of everything ever published: smooth, inoffensive, and weightless. It is not simply low quality. It is content with the taste removed, which is why audiences can sense it even when they cannot articulate why.
Can AI have taste?
No. Taste requires three things AI lacks by design: a point of view formed from a specific lived history, the willingness to decide when data is incomplete, and a self that can be held accountable for the choice. AI returns the safe middle of the distribution and has no reputation to lose, so nothing it produces is truly meant.
How do I use AI without producing slop?
Keep AI in the passenger seat. Use it for research, first drafts, and rapid options, then apply human judgment to every final decision. Put a named owner on anything that ships externally, someone who will defend the work. Speed of generation is not the same as quality of decision.
Why can people tell when content is AI-generated?
Because AI-generated content lacks a point of view and any sense of stakes, it reads as generic and weightless. The absence of a specific person behind the words is detectable even when the grammar is perfect. LinkedIn and Substack launching anti-slop features is direct evidence that audiences already recognize the pattern at scale.
Handing more of your marketing to AI and want a human’s judgment on your brand voice? Book a strategy call and we will pressure-test where taste belongs in your growth engine. Not sure a full-time hire is the move yet? Here is what a fractional CMO actually does.