The Atrophy of Human Creativity and the Loss of Taste
I recently came across a video posted on LinkedIn by an artist I’ve respected for quite some time from my years growing up in Orange County, California. We’ve existed on the periphery of each other’s circles for nearly fifteen years and while we’re not close personally, I’ve watched with real curiosity his work (which includes his graphic design company and his apparel brand) grow from a distance. What has always stood out to me was his patience in the growth process, his ability to stick to a clear ethos, and a remarkable attention to detail as it relates to his craft in a culture that rarely rewards any of those things for very long.
The video itself centered on a logo his design studio had created for a local Newport Beach business I was already very familiar with. Because I grew up in that area and understand the place, the pace, and how deeply the ocean informs the identity of businesses there, I immediately grasped how he was creatively weaving together a visual identity that was genuine, fresh and yet familiar. What struck me wasn’t just the final piece of art, though I found it somehow original and inviting while also seeming timeless, but the way he described arriving at it. His process clearly involved contemplation and listening. It was clear that he was able to pay attention, get present and let something reveal itself rather than forcing an outcome based on what is simply “on trend”. To me, that level of listening from a creative mind was remarkable because it was not ancillary to the work but was actually the hard work that invites a level of individual inspiration.
Heck, I’m writing about it now.
Since that day, I’ve been unable to shake my own internal questions about the future of art, design, and original creativity, both in business and in culture. In this increasingly beige era of aesthetics, so often framed as simplicity or minimalism, the depth beneath that logo really made me ponder about what we’re losing in this age of artificial intelligence, smart systems and automation. I found myself wondering, had that logo been generated by technology, would I have noticed the absence of the soul it clearly possesses now? Would I have even paused long enough to care if the work hadn’t clearly been cultivated through a human mind, hand, and the tangible presence of the designer? Maybe more unsettling is I have really started to wonder if anyone else cares anymore?
That question became existential rather quickly, and I’ve spent weeks since then thinking about the muddying of the line between man and machine. How will our phenomenology as human beings be shaped by the current zeitgeist of non-human art and design? Are we actually willing to trade our unique, lived experience of creativity, beauty, art, and taste for a co-created version with technology, a technology optimized not for depth but for what the system believes the masses want?
I don’t believe this is a wild hair idea or a curmudgeonly theory because for those with eyes to see, it’s unfolding quietly right in front of us.
My Experience
Over the past two years, I’ve had the opportunity to advise a number of leaders working directly in the world of AI. I’m not an expert in every technical detail, nor am I blind to the genuine benefits these tools can offer, but I’ve had enough proximity and have asked enough questions to see certain patterns forming. One thing that has become increasingly clear is the effect artificial intelligence is having on what people not only desire creatively, but what they come to expect as normal as it relates to creative outputs such as art and design or anything related to aesthetics ranging from style trends to construction elevations.
From my point of view, AI is not overpowering human choice through direct force. It’s a proper lie that acts more like a sucker punch that wobbles our decision making faculties making the use of our will and intellect feel unnecessary for more and more tasks if we allow it to. Think about it for a second, when decisions are anticipated for us, preferences are predicted, and friction (which leads to growth) removed from the creative process in the name of efficiency and immediate results, the human person is slowly relieved of the work of choosing anything more than a couple of options offered by a mean average of average data. This is marketed to all of us as progress, a grace for saving time in our busy lives or an opportunity to find more “freedom” but what is being traded away in the process is something much harder to recover.
Taste.
Taste is not preference or fashion or trend. It is not an aesthetic alignment to values alone or personal branding. While beauty can be argued to be objective, taste is actually a cultivated faculty which is learned through patience, attention, memory, and sustained contact with reality. It is an appreciation of magnificence which arises from our phenomenology. Taste requires sitting with things long enough for them to reveal themselves as being valuable, remarkable and lovely. That sitting/staying leading to what is considered tasteful required levels of boredom, difficulty, ambiguity, and restraint. Yet, at the end of that waiting process, something of depth could be revealed rather than fabricated. Furthermore, taste is not generated by exposure alone but is educated and discovered through lived, human experience and through the seemingly slow discernment of what we value and therefore what deserves our care.
Taste requires this human experience because it does not exist without a soul’s direction.
Artificial intelligence, by its very nature, does not offer this fullness of experience instead offering a type of compression. Like a zip folder for human expression, AI aggregates, smooths, and returns the equivalent of a flat, 2D image without the cost of time, struggle, or deep interior engagement. Its outputs can be visually impressive and undeniably fast, but they do not demand more than our initial input and eventual surrender to what the system determines is the best aggregated result. Even when those outputs are visually appealing, they do not ask anything of our soul and they certainly don’t require any patience, moral attention, or transformation.
AI has found a way to recognize what pleases us without obligating us to respond at a deeper level and that distinction, I believe, matters more than we’re comfortable admitting.
My Understanding
In this way, AI teaches us what usually works rather than what is genuinely true or meaningful for a particular person in a particular place at a particular moment. It offers the opposite of phenomenology as there is no lived (personal) context, no interior encounter, no embodied circumstance. Meaning is no longer discovered through experience but inferred from averages of average thinking. As Emmanuel Mounier warned, “A person is not an object to be known, but a mystery to be lived.” When technology moves from assisting our thinking to forming it, mystery is lost. meaning the age of human exploration is but a mere memory outside of learning to “prompt” that machine in new ways.
What I’m to say is that when meaning or taste or inputs or ideas are treated primarily as data points and prompts, they will no longer be encountered as mystery, and what cannot be encountered as mystery eventually loses its claim on our attention, our energy and our purpose. Mystery, human ingenuity and ongoing desire for discovery are the reason we are even able to sit where we are geographically and read this now on an electronic screen rather than still occupying the same physical and mental spaces as our ancestors. Progress is not a bad thing but when it’s built on a collective conscience that appreciates and values the human experience as opposed to (even accidentally) choking it out.
This loss of attention also carries another consequence that is easy to overlook. When taste is no longer formed, desire no longer knows has a place to aim. René Girard observed that human desire is mimetic which means that we learn what to want by watching what others appear to want. When taste is cultivated, imitation is guided by excellence and standards that point upward toward what is good, true, or beautiful. When taste collapses or is dictated by a soulless machine, imitation falls into that 2D feeling I noted earlier. In this collapse, desire begins to mirror not magnificence, but the mean average of the group’s mean average of thinking.
We are currently living inside systems shaped by aggregated data and optimized feedback loops. As a result, mimetic desire no longer reaches for depth at all but instead circulates. This is why social feeds begin to look the same, feel the same and call the same actions of the consumers. Creative outputs lose originality through dull repetition. When mimesis is formed by technology, people want what is already being wanted simply because it is visible, free, fast and common. The result is not vitality but a general numbness, a quiet apathy born from endless repetition of the same images, tones, hues and shallow satisfactions that follow instant gratification.
What we are witnessing today is not a violent rupture of our human experience but a more polite one. A collective agreement authored by the tools we use, signed off on (in a daze) by ourselves, that promotes a thinning of our experience as being fully acceptable if it saves time and makes things quick and easy. The offer is the equivalent of trading a long, formative journey for teleportation. Yes, we arrive intact, but unformed, having skipped the landscape, the boredom, the attention, and the realization that something essential has shaped us along the way, something that touches not only us, but our families, our communities, and future generations.
As someone who spends much of his days doing “business”, I can’t help but notice that art and design feel this shift first, because they depend on resistance to what is common in the system and an inspiration which comes from outside of it. When creation is merely reduced to selection and co-created iteration with the machine, the artist no longer gives form to a deeper reality but more or less curates outcomes from a system which is already saturated with prior (similar) expressions. How is this generative, how does it create taste and how is this original at all?
This shift is not neutral or natural and is leaving little room for what has historically animated art at its deepest levels: discipline, risk, encounter, attention, and even supernatural inspiration. Plus, in a strange way, it removes objective, innate beauty altogether.
Roger Scruton captured this when he wrote that “beauty is a call to attention.” Beauty does not exist to decorate our lives or simply engage our moods. It asks us to linger, care for, and love something beyond utility or even articulation. A culture that removes art in the name of efficiency does not become more advanced but becomes less human, less beautiful and lacks taste.
When the good, the true, and the beautiful end up getting “sidelined” as a result of their inefficiencies, something even more than taste is lost. Eventually the soul’s orientation towards order and gratitude dulls and the human free will is handed over to the shallow collective. Vocation, the voice of “calling” becomes harder to hear when quiet and stillness are replaced with constant prompts. “Like listening to somebody whisper at a rock concert” a friend of mine likes to say.
Ultimately, the writing is on the wall if we allow ourselves, our decision making and our creative inclinations to atrophy under the weight of technological progress as our guide and “end all”. God becomes easier to ignore, not because He is absent, but because our attention has been trained toward a new “provider” even if it is a flattened, two-dimensional world of screens, outputs, and simulations rather than the full, four-dimensional reality of lived time, presence, sacrifice, and embodied encounter with the world around us.
In the End
The danger before us is not that machines will dominate us, but that we will forget our role in shaping and stewarding them. I believe it is a responsibility (and gift) to own our tools so they do not end up owning us. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” That responsibility does not belong to technology itself, but to the cultural habits we allow to be formed around it. Will we be the mature grown up and raise what we’ve created well, or do we want to be its “friend”, only eventually to be guided by our fear of it.
My thought process and response is not a rejection of technology, but is really about a recovery of what makes us human, what makes life worth living, and what gives art, work, and relationship their value. It begins with discipline in ourselves, in our work, and in our callings. For individuals, this means choosing slowness even where speed is available, real authorship even where automation is offered, and attention our responsibilities as a moral act rather than something to be harvested for “aura”. It means resisting the hidden riptide that pulls us towards desiring the average and relearning how to choose deliberately, even when choosing is no longer required.
For leaders, brands, and businesses, the responsibility is a bit sharper and shall I say moral. Organizations shape the conditions in which attention is trained and desire is formed. That’s the psychology of marketing and propaganda which we must resist in spite of it being the proverbial “rock concert” we’re whispering at. When businesses optimize exclusively for speed, scale, and engagement, they don’t just chase efficiency, but they actually cultivate hollow expectations and a lower appreciation of taste. Over time, this approach erodes trust, differentiation, and meaning, even when the so-called metrics look healthy. Without change, the future begins to resemble fans being told who their favorite team should be and companies answering cues on dashboards instead of solving real problems with care and humility.
This re-ordering does not require nostalgia or resistance to technology. It requires Kobe Bryant, “Black Mamba” levels of discipline and mentality. It requires a commitment from those who care to pursue truth and clarity over noise and to form a real point of view rather than chasing trends dictated by algorithms.
Enduring businesses are rarely those that follow norms and averages. They are those that choose what they will not automate, what they will not optimize away, and what they will insist remains human and core to their reason for being. Every major brand who moves from inviting outsiders into their secure, clear promise succeeds. Those who chase trends eventually fall off. Do I really need to name names?
We are at a tipping point now, a fork in the road in which people and businesses will need to choose whether they want to be a human that leads the machine and retains their soul or if the idea of retiring their existence for a dull, monotonous future is a better option. To me, the opportunity in this increasingly gray world belongs to those willing to steward taste rather than chase preference and to shape desire upward and onward rather than mirror it back to the sameness all around us. The companies, brands and organizations that help people feel more present, more capable of judgment, and more connected to reality (not less) will thrive. Maybe not entirely on a financial riches scorecard but surely in depth, meaning, purpose and longevity.
If we handle our future with integrity I’m confident that the gifts which come with being human will endure and technology can remain a tool.
However, if we are not careful, it will become our teacher, and what it teaches us “politely”, whether we like it or not, is how to live without depth, without calling, and without the fullness of reality that once made us capable of choosing and experiencing all that is good, true and beautiful freely, together, and well.