How to Prove Your Taste (Because Having It Isn't Enough Anymore)

Everyone suddenly has taste. Almost nobody can prove it.

The word taste is having a moment. Every job ad wants judgement, every thread says it is the one thing AI cannot replace. And that is true. But there is a quieter problem underneath it. Taste is invisible. You cannot see someone's judgement on a CV. You cannot tell from a finished piece of work which decisions were deliberate and which were luck. So the people who actually get hired and paid are not the ones with the best taste. They are the ones who can show it. The gap between having judgement and proving it is where the money now sits.

Why finished work hides your best thinking

Here is the trap most creative and marketing people fall into. They show the output. The final campaign, the polished video, the finished brand. But the output is the one thing AI can now approximate in seconds. What it cannot do is make the call. The output hides the ten versions you rejected, the reason you chose this direction over the obvious one, the constraint you spotted that nobody briefed you on. That invisible layer, the why, is your actual value. And you are hiding it every time you only show the what.

The workflow: use AI to pull the proof out of your own work

Your judgement is buried in your work and you are too close to see it. So use AI to interrogate it out of you. Do this for one project you are proud of.

First, open Claude or ChatGPT and paste in the project, the brief, the final work, and a quick note on what you did. Then prompt it: "Act as a sharp creative director. Interrogate the decisions I made here. Ask me the questions that reveal why I chose this direction over the obvious ones." Let it question you. It will surface calls you made on instinct and never thought to articulate.

Second, answer its questions out loud or in the chat, then ask it to pull out the single decision only you could have made, and the options a more average person would have picked instead. This is the part you cannot see alone. AI is genuinely good at spotting the fork you did not notice you took.

Third, feed it the outcome. What happened because of that call, more engagement, a faster sign-off, a client who came back. Ask it to connect the decision to the result in one tight line, so your judgement stops being an opinion and becomes evidence.

Fourth, have it draft a three-sentence case study from all of the above, the decision, the rejected options, the outcome, then rewrite that draft in your own voice so it actually sounds like you. Put it on your profile, in your portfolio, in the interview.

Do this for three decisions and you have used AI not to make the work, but to prove the thinking behind it. Which, ironically, is the one thing AI cannot do for itself.

Taste is the asset. Proof is the price tag.

AI raised the floor on making things. Anyone can produce passable output now. That is exactly why the ability to make the right call, and to prove you made it on purpose, is the thing pulling ahead. The years on your CV are the fading metric. Demonstrated judgement is what the money attaches to now. So stop showing the world what you made. Start showing it what you decided.