AI Can Make You More Efficient. It Can't Give You Taste.
TLDR: AI is the most powerful efficiency tool marketers have ever had. But it can't give you taste, experience, or perspective. Those come from somewhere else entirely, and skipping the process of developing them is going to catch up with a lot of people.
AI Generated Cringe
I've been seeing more AI-generated event posters lately. Bars, restaurants, and local businesses are promoting their events with images that are immediately, viscerally off. Not because they're ugly (they often are, though!), but because they feel like nobody made a decision. Nobody looked at it and thought about whether it was good. They just generated it and posted it.
Seeing them pop up on my feed makes me consider unfollowing the account (and I have!).
This is not an aesthetic preference. That's a brand trust problem. And it's happening because somewhere along the way, someone decided that AI could replace the judgment that goes into making something worth looking at.
It can't.
What AI Actually Does Well
I use Claude every day. For ad copy, email writing, AEO strategy, research, and campaign planning. It makes me faster, sharper, and more consistent. I am a better marketer because of it.
But here's the thing: I was already a marketer. I already had opinions. I already knew what good looked like and what cringe felt like in my chest before I could articulate why.
AI amplified that. It didn't create it, though.
What AI Can't Give You
Taste
Taste is the ability to look at something and know, before you can explain it, whether it's right or wrong. Good or bad.
It's visceral.
It's personal.
It's cultural and emotional and community-driven all at once.
AI can approximate patterns from data. It can tell you what has performed well historically. It can generate something that looks statistically similar to things that have worked before.
But it doesn't cringe because it’s never been embarrassed. It has no emotional stake in whether something lands. That absence is exactly what you're looking at when you see one of those event posters and immediately want to unfollow the account.
Experience
I made bad stuff early in my career. It's genuinely cringe to think about. But making all the bad stuff is what made me good at making good stuff.
That process, the iteration, the failure, the gradual calibration of your own judgment, is not something you can skip. And a lot of new marketers are skipping it right now. They're using AI to generate work before they've developed the taste to evaluate it. They're outsourcing the judgment before they've built it.
That's eventually going to catch up with them.
Perspective
Good marketing comes from a specific point of view. Mine comes from years in customer success before I ever had a marketing title, which means I know what customers actually sound like when they're frustrated or confused or delighted. It comes from being a marketing team of two at multiple companies, which means I had to have strong opinions across every discipline and be able to defend them. It comes from traveling regularly and paying attention to the world around me.
That accumulation of lived experience is what makes marketing feel human. AI doesn't have it. It can pattern-match against everyone else's lived experience, but it can't bring yours.
The New Marketer Problem
Now, this is the part that worries me most.
There's a generation of marketers entering the workforce right now who are using AI to do the work before they've learned to do the work themselves. They're generating copy without developing a writing voice. They're producing creative without developing taste. They're skipping the bad years that make the good years possible.
AI is a tool. But, like any tool, it works best in the hands of someone who already knows what they're trying to build. Hand someone a perfect bottle of wine and no palate to appreciate it, and you don't get a better wine experience. You get an expensive glass of something they can't evaluate or form an opinion on.
When Companies Eliminate Marketing Entirely
More and more companies are making the decision to eliminate their marketing function altogether, betting that AI can cover the gap. It can't.
What they're actually eliminating is the taste, judgment, and strategic thinking that make marketing work. AI can execute. It can generate. It can produce volume. But it can't decide what's worth saying, who needs to hear it, or whether the thing it just made is good or embarrassing. That still requires a human with experience and perspective.
The companies cutting marketing teams to save money and replace the function with AI are going to find out. Maybe not immediately. But brand erosion is slow and cumulative, and by the time it's obvious something is wrong, it's usually expensive to fix.
AI Is a Multiplier, Not a Replacement
The best way I can put it: AI makes good marketers better. It makes average marketers look better than they are, temporarily. And it does nothing for people who haven't done the work of developing taste, experience, and perspective.
Those things still have to come from somewhere.
They still have to come from you.
Katie Frank is a B2B SaaS growth marketer based in Birmingham, AL. She writes about marketing and travel at katiefrankmarketing.com
