When everyone can generate, taste is the moat

There's nothing new to say about AI text in 2026. It's good enough. It's everywhere. It costs so little that the marginal cost of one more word is essentially zero.

Which means any person — or any company — can produce ten times the content they could three years ago, at a tenth of the cost.

And most of it is bad.

Not "wrong" — just limp. The kind of text you read without your brain catching on anything. Sentences that are grammatically correct and contain roughly correct words, but say nothing new or specific. Content built to be content, not to be read.

The skill that has gone up in value — not down — is taste. The ability to look at an AI draft and say: this is cliché, this is actually precise, this needs to be cut, this is the first interesting paragraph and it should be at the top.

It doesn't require technical knowledge of models or prompting. It requires familiarity with what good work in your field looks like, and a willingness to edit hard.

Concrete example: when I write blog posts like this one, AI probably produces 60 percent of the raw text. I write the thesis, the anchor example, and the last sentence — the parts that are actually the argument. The AI fills in. Then I go through and cut everything that's good-enough-but-not-good. That's a large category.

The result isn't "AI-written". It isn't "hand-written" either. It's edited. That's the difference that matters.

The same dynamic applies to code, design, analysis, customer communication, proposals, reports, presentations. Generation is free. Judgement is the scarce resource.

That means two things for SMBs planning their AI use:

First: don't hire based on "can this person prompt well". Hire based on "does this person have taste in your field". Prompting skills can be learned in a week. Taste takes years.

Second: if your product or service competes on content, copy, design, or analysis, you now compete against AI-generated volume. The only way to win is by being clearly better. Not slightly better. Clearly.

That sounds unfriendly. It's also the kindest read I can give of the next five years.