Taste has always mattered in the creation of excellent, beautiful things. And curation has been the means by which people of taste collect and share the things they find exceptional. As we step into the age of AI, we also step into the age of curation.
It is now cheaper than ever to generate an article, an image, or a video. What we've achieved in volume, we may have lost in quality. Craft, excellence remains as difficult as ever because the main effort in craft is not the labour to create the artifact. The labour is in deciding what is good and seeing the vision realized. A reduction in labour does not guarantee an increase in quality in the things we make. Look at what's happened with fast fashion.
Excellence is the byproduct of caring more than is reasonable. It is less work now to generate more variations and to explore more ideas. And while we might have less busywork, our values and intellect continue to be challenged. We have to decide what we'll bring into the world. One might even argue, now that we can explore so many more ideas, our workload has increased because we have so much more to consider.
I predict we'll see more sites curating the "best ofs" across industries and disciplines. Matters of craft, taste, and beauty will mark the years to come as the robots join our midst.
