What does your internal voice sound like? Only you know its cadence, its accent, its way of pausing between thoughts. Only you know how it rises when excited or drops to a murmur when uncertain. This inner voice, uniquely yours, impossible to replicate, is what taste is all about. And it's precisely what AI, despite its glorious efficiency in automation, cannot capture. Yet art can.
Taste emerges from the accumulation of everything that makes you singular. It's the residue of your highs and lows, your resilience learned through mistakes, your celebrations and losses. It forms through encounters with people from every corner of the world, through meals in the best and worst restaurants, through wandering galleries and discovering artworks that stop you in your tracks. It's this amalgamation of experiences that led you to this moment.
In museums, as with many of life's experiences, we instinctively compare what we're seeing with what we've seen before. We construct our understanding, layer by layer, building a framework that becomes our lived experience -- something that develops every minute of every day, yet remains personal and distinctly yours, just like your inner voice. The way I would curate an exhibition and how you would approach it are different. How an artist creates a work is completely different from that of another.
When I use AI, I spend more time negotiating and explaining what I mean than I would if I'd have just done it myself. Yes, it can tick a box and fill a space, but life is more than that. In the case of ChatGPT or similar, its responses are not meaningful, but mere predictions based on what's come before; it's vanilla, it's beige, it's basic. It's artificial.
The argument that AI is biased isn't going to stick. Of course it is biased. Everything is. You are, I am, museums are. The data we pick to collect and analyse is biased. The questions we ask and interpret are biased. The things we include -- and don't -- are a bias. There is no escaping it. But it's about what we do with that bias. It's about recognising that taste isn't neutral; it's deeply subjective and shaped by systems of power, access, and legacy. What we perceive as "good" or "refined" often carries layers of bias, including the influence of colonial narratives and dominant cultural norms. The more we, as humans, become aware of that, the more expansive and inclusive our understanding of value and creativity can become.
Taste cannot be quantified or placed neatly in a spreadsheet. It has a habit of surprising even its maker. Unlike data points that can be aggregated and optimized, taste operates in the realm of the ineffable -- that space between instinct and distinctiveness, where true innovation lives. This non-standardisable, dynamic aspect of taste makes defining it so elusive, because it is both important to discover but impossible to domesticate.
Today, creating something meaningful requires doubling down and integrating your perspective, which needs to be nuanced and complex, shaped by your lived experiences. This point of view needs to adopt an interpretive paradigm, embracing different ontological perspectives and epistemological roots -- a synthesis of subjectivism, constructivism, and critical inquiry. AI can't do this. It cannot lean on the weight of life, it cannot bring diverse perspectives, it cannot reflect on what it feels like to live and experience a fractured world, nor can it understand the complexity of cultural hybridity, or the nuance of existing between worlds.
AI can only process information once it's been transformed into digital data. It has never heard a word spoken aloud, never felt the awkwardness of silence, never experienced the heat of an argument. It hasn't heard its own voice. When AI generates content, it cannot originate style with intentionality because it lacks the very thing that makes style meaningful: a point of view forged through living.
Every time we uncritically accept AI's definition of what's attractive or artistic, we participate in the slow erasure of diverse thought. When AI systems train on billions of images that overwhelmingly represent certain standards, normalcy, virtues, and aesthetic preferences, they don't just learn patterns -- they amplify dominant visions, and in doing so, make them matter more than others. This creates a feedback loop of sameness -- trained on its own data -- potentially entrenching these narratives even further into a web of uniformity and sold to us as universally appealing. Whose culture are we transmitting? Whose dreams deserve amplification and whose taste constitutes the baseline for creativity?
I want to work on exhibitions that AI can't. I want to ask questions that AI cannot answer. Of course, AI will give an answer -- it always does -- but I want another side of the story. I want a counterargument; I want a deep, complex, entangled, and deeply thought-provoking assembling of ideas, concepts, and opinions. As we like to say at the Media Majlis Museum: there is always another side.
Yet we also cannot overlook AI's potential, and using it simply to become more efficient misses the point. AI should be used to enhance the creativity of highly imaginative individuals. When we reduce AI to a tool for doing things faster and cheaper, we miss its capacity to help us dream bigger, think stranger, imagine wilder. The real opportunity isn't in replacing human creativity but in amplifying it, in creating space for the weird and wonderful ideas that only emerge when humans have the time and freedom to play.
The world has never needed taste more urgently. When every option is instantly available, when every variation is possible, the person who knows which one to choose becomes invaluable. Taste develops through exposure, curation, and reflection. You have to see, hear, and feel to understand what excellence looks like. You must discern and recognise distinctions that matter. These preferences express values that go beyond aesthetics. They reveal how you see the world. As you evolve, so do your sensibilities. This maturation -- from reaction to reflection, from preference to philosophy -- is a fundamentally human process that no algorithm can replicate.
Only you know your taste. Like the voice in your head, it's yours alone. It's cultivated through years of paying attention, of caring deeply, of being willing to be wrong. It emerges from the messy, complicated, gloriously inefficient process of being human.
As we stand at the threshold of an AI-saturated future, the question isn't whether machines can create -- they clearly can. The question is whether we'll remember why human creation matters. Not because it's more efficient or optimised, but because it carries the weight of a life lived, the perspective of a unique consciousness, the irreplaceable value of someone believing something matters. Ultimately, an understanding of what is artificial and what is not.
Jack Thomas Taylor is the curator of Art, Media and Technology at the Media Majlis Museum, a university museum in Northwestern Qatar's school in Doha.