Opinion is the moat.

Taste is the answer our profession has reached for, and it is the wrong one. The harder question is who will stand behind a decision when it starts costing something.

Our profession has settled quickly on an answer to what AI does to it, and I think that answer is wrong in an instructive way.

## The reply is taste

That reply is taste. Anyone can generate a screen now, so what remains is judgment, discernment, knowing which of the four options is the good one. [Karri Saarinen](https://stateofaidesign.com/chapters/craft) at Linear locates it earlier, in understanding the problem well enough to know what should exist at all. [Joel Lewenstein](https://stateofaidesign.com/chapters/craft) at Anthropic makes it a question of where a designer stays involved, and which problems still need a person at all.

None of them is wrong about the practice, and I would not argue with any of it as a description of the work. My objection is to what happens when a profession makes this its answer to an existential question.

[Julie Zhuo](https://lg.substack.com/p/when-ai-has-better-taste-than-you) has already said the uncomfortable part out loud. Taste, at least as most of us have it, is pattern recognition across a large amount of absorbed culture. That is precisely the kind of thing these systems are good at. What remains distinctly human, she argues, is not taste but agency.

I would put it more bluntly for our field. Taste is becoming the second seat at the table. It has the same shape as the first. A scarce-sounding property we assign to ourselves. Defended in conference talks, unfalsifiable from outside, and not something anybody else in the company has agreed to price. We spent fifteen years arguing that design deserved authority because design was strategic. We are now arguing that design deserves authority because design has taste. Both arguments are addressed to ourselves. Which is fine, designers be like that.

## Opinion makes the commitment explicit

What actually survives is narrower than agency and less flattering than taste. It is opinion.

Taste and opinion overlap. Models can predict aesthetic preferences; [NIMA](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05424), for example, learns distributions of human image ratings. The distinction I care about is what happens when a judgment becomes a product decision. Someone authorizes it, accepts what it excludes and owes an explanation when it fails.

Taste already sorts people. [Bourdieu](https://books.google.com/books/about/Distinction.html?id=nVaS6gS9Jz4C) spoke about this a long time ago. Opinion makes the commitment explicit: who the product is for, what it refuses, and whose name goes against the decision. My objection to work optimized for an agreeable finish is that you can replace it without losing anything anyone was prepared to defend.

AI can cover a wall with convincing directions for a product. Someone still has to point at one and say: this is what we're building. They have to put a team and a budget behind it, and face that team if it fails.

Picture a street of beautifully dressed shop windows. Each looks good on its own, but after a few blocks you can barely remember which was which. In [one experiment with short stories](https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adn5290), AI helped people write stories that received higher ratings, but the stories also became more alike. I worry about product design ending up on that street. Everything looks good. Nothing gives you a reason to stop.

## What it costs to hold one

The reason this is not a comfortable conclusion is that opinion is expensive in a way taste is not.

Taste can be exercised privately. You can have immaculate judgment, apply it in reviews, and never once put your name against a position that could turn out to be wrong. Plenty of careers are built that way and they are not dishonorable. An opinion committed to a product is different. It is dated, attributed, and available to be held against you for as long as the thing exists.

What makes it expensive is that it has to be attributable to be worth anything. An opinion nobody can trace to a person is a mood. So the record of what was decided and by whom, which is the thing that makes an opinion count, is the same record that can be read back later as an inventory of everything you got wrong.

It helps to name a few, because the abstraction hides how ordinary this is.

**Trust as a requirement.** When I led design at Honor, we wanted to build an uplifting, empowering brand in a home care industry full of tacky stock photography. We were asking families to trust someone to care for a person they loved. That had to shape more than the marketing. We kept brand and product design together, working across the products and materials that families and Care Pros encountered. The opinion shaped how we organized the team and what we expected designers to take responsibility for. The brand was making a promise about the care. The rest of the company had to keep it.

**Disappearing by default.** Early Snapchat committed to ephemerality and an interface that offered strangers little guidance. Stories was copied across Meta's products, and other networks launched variants. Snap later added optional public subscriber counts, so the early rejection of public metrics was not permanent. Its 2018 redesign met sustained resistance; Snap's [Q1 2018 results](https://investor.snap.com/news/news-details/2018/Snap-Inc-Reports-First-Quarter-2018-Results/default.aspx) acknowledged disruption from the change. The lesson is narrower than a stock-price story: changing an established product opinion can make the people who chose it feel abandoned.

**And the institutional version.** In August 2025, the White House established a Chief Design Officer and a National Design Studio through its America by Design initiative. That is a clear opinion about what government should look and feel like, loaded with all the administration's hubris. Whoever takes the role puts their name to it.

That last one is the honest version of the cost. There is no arrangement in which you hold an opinion in public and nobody gets to hold it against you.

Which is why most organizations quietly select against it. Not deliberately. A process of consensus, a review that rewards the defensible option, a manager who wants the safe version by Thursday. None of that is anybody being cowardly. It is a system doing what systems do, which is smooth out the odd answer. An opinion is the odd answer.

A standard encoded in a component survives the person who cared about it. A standard living in a head leaves when the head does. Taste is the first one only if somebody does the work of moving it.

So if you run a design organization, the useful question is not whether your people have taste. They do, or they would not have been hired. It is whether anything in the way you work makes it possible for one of them to be wrong in public, with their name on it, and still be there afterwards.

## Make the opinion answerable

Before the meeting, ask people to write down what they think should happen. Otherwise the first confident person supplies the room with its opinion. Name who decides, what the customer evidence says, what is still assumed and the strongest case against the choice. Make it possible to tell who contributed from who authorized it.

Then write down what you expect to change, for whom and by when. Include how sure you are, what cannot be traded away in safety, quality, accessibility or trust, and what would make you reverse the decision. Put a name and a review date against it. When the result arrives, leave the original prediction where everyone can see it.

The point of that record is to make the opinion easier to challenge. Without it, naming an owner can become one more way of protecting whoever already gets the last word.

I've led design and product at Honor, Lyft, Grammarly and Pitch, and today I build at Noord. This began as two sections inside [The Head of Design is not the head of design](https://www.renatovaldes.com/essays/the-head-of-design/), which is about where design authority actually sits. [Julie Zhuo on taste and agency](https://lg.substack.com/p/when-ai-has-better-taste-than-you) is the argument this leans on hardest and then departs from. [Karri Saarinen and Joel Lewenstein](https://stateofaidesign.com/chapters/craft) are quoted for the position I am arguing against, and neither is wrong about the practice. Read one way this is a license to be contrarian, which is not what I mean. The commitment needs consequences and a way to be challenged; contrarianism on its own supplies neither.