What happens when AI robs us of our sense of taste?

I’ve had several jobs where judgement was the core skill. I’ve been a music producer, advertising creative director, TV director and editor at large of a magazine. Very different industries, but the principle was the same: my job was to know when something was good, and then push it towards something better.

And I learned that judgement isn’t a gift: it’s something you earn.

You earn it by obsessively putting in the hours outside work. By studying great work, by comparing the good to the mediocre, and by practicing until your brain starts to twitch when something’s off.

You earn it through the uncomfortable business of being wrong, asking for feedback, and doing better the next time.

Which is why I’m worried. Because I’m watching people outsource the very process that builds judgement. They’re using AI to produce work before they’ve developed their discernment filter. And what emerges is inevitably AI slop.

If you’re not spotting it on your LinkedIn feed, it’s a sign that you should maybe invest in building your own judgement.

The age of “That’ll do, I guess ”

My LinkedIn feed is packed with substandard garbage. I do what I can to improve things by unfollowing or muting the worst culprits. But I can’t eliminate it completely.

But poor judgement is most pernicious when it happens in the workplace. You may notice it in vacuous marketing content, or shallow business reports, or strategy decks that are all style but lacking substance. I see these things as the tip of the slop-berg. It’s the less visible work that concerns me.

Because it’s harder to see if judgement is lacking from your sales analytics, business strategies, and boardroom decisions. You’ll only see the repercussions when you publish 2026’s annual report at the very earliest.

A sign of there being a problem is when people paste work into ChatGPT to see if it’s any good. As well as leaving themselves at the mercy of generic machine thinking, they are eroding their own value.

Giving your judgement away is one of the most harmful forms of cognitive erosion. When we stop using judgement, we stop strengthening it. To compound this, employees of all abilities are susceptible to automation bias - when they over-trust automated or AI outputs because they feel smart - even when they’re wrong.

But when an organisation has a myopic focus on productivity, this issue doesn't even appear on their radar.

Judgement may be the most under-rated skill

For most of my career in the creative industries, I thought the measure of my ability was how many ideas I could churn out. I was wrong. The secret of amazing creative people is their ability to tell if an idea is any good and to know how to improve it.

Their value is their judgement.

Just look at how the Grammys, the Oscars, the Tonys, or the Quantity Surveyors Annual Excellence Awards work. They have a jury of experienced judges - in other words, people who’ve developed judgement - making decisions about whether a piece of work passes their high standards or not. If you churn things out without understanding what good looks like, you won’t be going home with a gong.

The people with good judgement are judging you on your judgement.

Your value isn’t in the quantity you churn out, it’s in the quality you craft.

Judgement is made of several interlocking muscles:

• Pattern recognition: seeing how current work echoes past, excellent examples
• Assumption testing: knowing which variables matter and which don’t
• Context sensitivity: seeing when rules break down or when exceptions matter
• Stakeholder dynamics: anticipating how different groups will respond
• Risk calibration: knowing how confident to be - not overconfidence, not timid hesitation

And good judgement compounds. It impacts your decisions and leads to better outcomes. As you continue to learn and refine your discernment, you reach higher than before.

How to develop your judgement

Here’s the hopeful bit: judgement isn’t some mystical quality bestowed upon a chosen few thanks to a celestial alignment on the night of their birth. It’s a skill - and, inconveniently for the lazy among us, it’s a skill you have to work at.

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson spent decades studying how people become world-class at anything - musicians, surgeons, chess players, pilots - and his conclusion was painfully unglamorous: you get good by practising deliberately. It’s not about racking up hours; it’s about wrestling with the bits you’re bad at, getting feedback, and doing it again until your brain starts to rewire itself.

Follow-up studies have found the same pattern everywhere from medicine to sports: the people who improve fastest are the ones who seek friction. They invite critique, replay their mistakes, and push into uncomfortable areas. Meanwhile, their peers are still coasting on autopilot, clocking the same hours but learning nothing new.

And here’s where it gets interesting in the age of AI. You might think that teaming up with a super-smart machine would make you better at decisions. But not so fast. A meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour found that human-AI duos often perform worse than either the best human or the best AI alone when it comes to judgement calls. In other words: if you haven’t built your own evaluative muscles, the algorithm doesn’t save you - it amplifies your ineptitude.

MIT Sloan researchers put it more politely, but the message’s the same: humans and AI make a rather good creative duo, but a rather disastrous decision-making couple.

There is, however, a silver lining. When humans actually do have strong judgement, AI can act like a brilliant research assistant - not a replacement, but a sharpener. In recent forecasting studies, people using AI tools improved their accuracy by about 25% - precisely because they already knew how to evaluate and refine what the machine produced.

So, the rule of thumb is simple: you can’t outsource the thinking until you’ve earned the judgement to know what’s worth keeping.

Building your judgement muscle

If judgement is the muscle that’s quietly wasting away in the age of AI, then it’s time for a proper training plan. And no, you won’t find it in a productivity hack or a shiny new prompt template. Building judgement is less about “hacking” and more about sweating - the mental equivalent of showing up at the gym, doing the hard reps, and resisting the lure of the shortcut machine in the corner.

So here are some practical routines and mindset shifts that will help you develop your judgement - even when the path of least resistance is to sigh, shrug, and “just ask the AI.”:

• Consume excellence intentionally. Don’t passively scroll. Seek out the stuff that makes you go “Damn! I wish I’d done that!” and actively ask: Why is this good? What choices did the creator make? Where would I do it differently? Make notes in the back pages of your Moleskine, in your phone’s notes app, or carve it into your desk like a 12-year-old.
• Work without AI sometimes. Separate yourself from your AI assistant. Let yourself flounder. Let your instincts stretch. Get into the habit of having a no-AI afternoon. Or day. Or month.
• Keep a decision journal. Before you decide, write your reasoning. After the outcome, revisit your reasoning. Pay careful attention to any biases and blind spots that held you back.
• Teach and mentor. Explaining your worldview helps you see your gaps. When you evaluate others’ thinking, your own becomes sharper. Teaching is the best way to learn. Trust me, it’s what I do for a living.
• Compare good vs mediocre. Side-by-side comparison trains discrimination. It’s important to know what’s not good as well as what is. And to understand how to avoid mediocrity as well as how to achieve excellence.

I’ve been teaching this kind of thing a lot lately to our clients at The Gen AI Academy. Because in a world where AI tools can spit out ideas faster than a hundred humans chained to typewriters (which sounds like an HR nightmare), knowing how to select and refine the best idea is what makes the difference.

Why organizations should care

Anyone with a finance brain is probably muttering, “Lovely sentiment, but what’s the ROI on something as fluffy as judgement?”

Easy, tiger. Judgement isn’t a luxury in our new augmented age, it’s the very thing that creates profit, trust, and long-term advantage.

• Tools don’t define excellence - people do. Without investment in human capability, organizations end up worshipping the software instead of the skill.
• Opportunity hides in plain sight. You can’t measure the deals you never saw or the insights you never recognised- but judgement is what reveals them.
• Speed without sense is expensive. If you’re obsessively focused on productivity gains, you might just get them (I said ‘might’). They’ll look great on your short-term balance sheet but they’re likely to bite you on the arse when the long-term erosion of what made your organisation good hits your balance sheet.
• Discernment is the new differentiator. In a world drowning in output and automated processes, the ability to spot what truly matters is what clients and customers will pay for.

The smartest investment a company can make isn’t another AI license - it’s the scaffolding that strengthens its people’s judgement. Because when everyone else is racing to automate, the real advantage lies with those who still know what good looks like.

Be more valuable than an AI tool

If you’re looking for a line to pull out and quote, here you go:

AI can produce output. Only humans can decide what’s worth keeping.

That’s not a throwaway sentence. It’s a distillation of why judgement is important. It’s the difference between mastery and mediocrity. Between a future of bland AI slop and a future where human ability is still valued.

Go build your judgement muscle. Build it in your teams. Build it across your entire organisation. Because it’s the superpower that no AI can replicate.

Not just yet, anyway.

Dave Birss is Co-Founder of The Gen AI Academy - a collection of over 30 AI experts offering practical training and advice for companies all over the world. If you haven't taken his LinkedIn Learning courses, you really should.