I want to make an argument, and I want to make it plainly, because it is something twenty years of this work has slowly taught me.
Artificial intelligence will not replace taste. If anything, it raises the price of having it.
The reasoning is simple. When a thing becomes abundant, its value collapses. That is just how scarcity works, and it has happened to every craft that was ever industrialised. What survives is never the ability to produce. It is the ability to judge.
And production has just gone from expensive to nearly free. Anyone can generate a logo, a layout, a page, a campaign, in seconds, at a quality that would have been a decent day's work five years ago. The floor has come up so fast that competence itself is now common.
Which means the market for being merely competent is thinning out, and I don't think that has quite sunk in yet. If your value was that you could operate the software, the ground is shifting under you, and prompt engineering is not really a way out, because prompt engineering is also just operating software.
What cannot be generated is knowing which one is right. Why the second option is a trap. What this particular business, in this particular town, actually needs, and what it should not spend money on. That is not information. It is judgment, and judgment is made of scar tissue, and scar tissue takes years and cannot be prompted into existence.
So I am not worried about the machines. I worry more for anyone who spent their career learning where the buttons are. The buttons are moving. What is left is the question the buttons could never answer, and it is the same question it has always been. What is this actually for?