The trained eye

Spoken words only - one hook counted, captions and notes excluded, at 130 wpm.

Hook

• AI didn't make everyone a designer. It made taste the whole game.
• Everyone feels like a designer now. Taste is the only thing that still separates the work.
• To an untrained eye, AI output looks amazing. To a trained one, the mistakes jump straight off the screen.

Body

Here's the part the AI hype skips.

It makes everyone feel like a designer, or a developer, or a director. You generate something, sit back, and think, that's actually pretty good.

Then you look again.

I've been in the creative industry for a long time, and more tools are integrating AI every day. Personally, I think AI is a marketing term for new features. We say "AI" like it's one thing, when it's really a hundred different LLMs and tools, each with different strengths.

Here's what they've all got in common. They pick up and execute in patterns. And everywhere you don't give them an instruction, they assume the answer and fill in the blank space. Thats where we often get excited.

To an untrained eye, that looks fantastic. For a designer or developer, you notice the unmatched patterns almost immediately.

So when you're prompting away, and it's still generating what you want, one of two things is going on. Either you can't yet articulate how to fix it, or the tool you're using can't get to the level you're after.

To an untrained eye, you can't see what's off, so you can't make your improvement. To a trained eye, you can. You see the covered gaps clearly, and your critique comes in.

This is where we try to push the limits of the capabilities, and find out exactly what can and can't be done. This area of experimentation is where we should live to push innovation.

A lot of people won't. They're quietly worried the tool will do it better than they can. Fair enough. But the ones who push anyway are moving faster than everyone else, especially when it comes to content. That is where it is the most obvious. The speed some people are producing at now is wild.

And the best of them? You honestly can't spot where the AI is. You'll wonder, sure, and most of them did use it, but it's executed so well, so embedded in their taste, that the tells you'd normally catch just aren't there.

So it stops being the question. You're not picking the work apart for the AI bits, because nothing jars. You're just enjoying the work, the story, the fact it's so clearly theirs.

When you can't tell where they end, and the AI begins, that's taste.

Because the eye that gets you there isn't something you download. You build it. Years of looking, making, and caring about the details most people scroll straight past.

The tools are free now. The eye that knows what to do with them isn't.

CTA

• Tell me the one thing your eye always catches that AI keeps getting wrong.
• What's the detail you can't unsee once you've spotted it? Drop it in the comments.

Post image text

The tools are free. The eye isn't