The last barrier against AI is good taste. The problem is that an entire generation is growing up without developing it

The new normal in three acts:

1. You open X and find a clearly AI-generated image trying to look legitimate. But it’s not bad, it complies.
2. You go to LinkedIn and find a piece that reeks of ChatGPT, but you get the idea that its author wanted to convey.
3. In GitHub You find code that works, but that no sensible programmer would write like that. You let it go.

welcome to the era of “good enough”.

Generative AI has made it easy, fast, and free to produce “acceptable” things, and that has moved the collective bar for quality. Not upward but towards “functional”. The worrying thing is not that AI produces mediocrity, but that it is accustoming us to accepting it.

Before, if we needed an image for the article, we had to look for it or – for those who had ID – order it. There was friction or there was cost. Now we generate it in fifteen seconds (wink), and since it “serves”, it stays there (wink, wink, nudge). Even if it is generic or has that artificial veneer that we all recognize but no one talks about anymore.

The problem is that when something acceptable costs nothing to produce, we stop asking ourselves if it is worth doing. We’re just wondering if it meets the minimum. AND meeting the minimum is not the same as doing something good.

In development this is also very noticeable. An experienced and talented programmer instantly recognizes whether a code has been written by an AI. Even if it works (we already take that for granted), you can tell by the verbiage, because it is redundant, because it is not very elegant. It does what it has to do, but no senior He would be proud to have it bearing his signature.

What is going to happen to a generation that is going to learn to program using AI from day one? If you’ve never written bad code and then understood what makes it good, how are you going to develop judgment?

Good taste does not come standard. It is built by seeing many bad things, many good things, making mistakes. AI saves you that path by giving you something that works from the first try. But without going down that path, you never develop the eye to distinguish.

Therein lies the risk. AI has raised the floor (anyone can produce something decent), but the ceiling is still just as high. At least for the majority. Creating something exceptional requires the same things as always: talent, effort, judgment. Only now it is buried under tons of slop and mediocre but functional content. And since creating it is free, we produce it non-stop.

Human value remains in taste. Knowing how to look at something and say “okay, it’s good, but it’s not good”. But that criterion is only formed with practice. If an entire generation grows up consuming and producing what “just delivers,” how are they going to learn what is excellent? If you have never seen the difference, that difference does not exist for you.

We are heading towards a world where it will be normalized that “good enough” is the only standard because we forget how to recognize when something will be done well.

In Xataka | There is a generation working for free as a documentarian of their own life: they are not influencers but they act as if they were.

Featured image | Xataka with Nano Banana