Taste Atrophy

The real risk when using AI for decisions

Everyone’s talking about AI causing brain atrophy. The worry is that we’ll stop thinking, stop learning, stop doing our own research because the answers are always just a prompt away.

I think that’s the wrong fear. Or at least, it’s not the dangerous part.

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We’ve been here before. Google made information so accessible that we stopped treating it as valuable. You don’t memorize things anymore because you don’t have to (everything’s just a 2-second search away!). And maybe that changed something in us. Maybe we became a little lazier about retaining knowledge, about building our own internal models of how the world works. Take my holed memory as an example, I can’t remember a single friend’s birthday (sorry guys - hope you love me still).

AI accelerates this. Now you don’t even need to search. You just ask. Voice note, text prompt, doesn’t matter. The answer arrives instantly, pre-digested, ready to use.

But losing research skills, losing the muscle memory of finding information yourself, is not actually the problem.

The problem is when you stop using your own judgment about what to do with the information.

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I’ve been watching people use AI not just for answers, but for decisions. They ask it what path to choose. What direction to take. How to solve a problem they’re stuck on. And I think this is where things get dangerous.

Because the risk isn’t that you stop knowing things. The risk is that you stop choosing things.

Information is passive. You can absorb it, store it, retrieve it. But decisions—real decisions—require something AI can’t give you: taste.

Not just critical thinking. That too, but taste goes a step further.

Taste is how you weigh competing priorities that don’t have obvious answers. It’s how you know which trade-off to make when both options seem equally valid on paper. It’s the accumulation of everything you’ve experienced, everything you’ve tried and failed at, everything you believe about how the world works—compressed into a gut sense of what feels right.

You can’t outsource that.

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And yet I see people trying to. They give AI all the context, all the data, all the constraints, and then ask it to tell them what to do. As if a model trained on the aggregated decisions of millions of people could somehow know what you should do in your specific situation.

But living your life isn’t a serie of equations, like robots’. It’s doing sometimes random, spontaneous, illogical things that lead to the most beautiful outcome: life happening.

AI can’t take such decision. It can only tell you what most people would do. Which means if you rely on it for decisions, you become like most people.

That’s the opposite of entrepreneurship.

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Entrepreneurship is going against the current. It’s the decision to not follow the standard path (the bachelor’s degree, the corporate ladder, the safe progression everyone else is climbing). It’s choosing to build something that doesn’t exist yet, to pursue a direction that doesn’t have proof it will work.

If you start delegating that choice-making to an AI, you’re not an entrepreneur anymore. You’re just someone following instructions. The instructions might be coming from a language model instead of a boss, but the passivity is the same.

Because you can give AI all the prompts you want: feed it your entire context, your goals, your constraints, your market data. It still won’t have your taste. It won’t understand the nuances only you can see. It won’t know which risks are worth taking because it hasn’t lived your experience.

Taste is human. It’s built from failure, from surprise, from all the times something worked for reasons you didn’t predict. AI doesn’t have that. It has patterns. It has probabilities. But it doesn’t have the idiosyncratic judgment that makes you you.

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I think what we’re seeing with AI is the same thing we saw with social media: not a tool that makes us dumber, but a tool that makes us flatter. Less distinct. More generic.

Social media didn’t destroy our ability to think. It destroyed our ability to have interesting thoughts by constantly showing us what everyone else was thinking, which made us unconsciously converge toward the median.

AI does the same thing, but for decisions. It shows you the most statistically likely answer. And if you keep choosing that answer, you stop developing your own sense of what you think is right.

You lose your taste.

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So the real risk is not that you’ll become stupid; it’s that you’ll become lifeless.

Life without taste is a life lived in the generic middle, where every choice is safe and every decision is average. Nothing you do, build, live… feels like yours.

That’s the opposite of why anyone becomes an entrepreneur in the first place.

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So if you’re stuck, if you’re doubting your path, if you’re trying to figure out what to do next: talk to someone human. Not a chatbot, nor an AI agent.

The thing you actually need isn’t information, but perspective. Someone far enough outside your situation to see patterns you can’t see, but close enough to understand what makes your context different from everyone else’s.

Someone who can help you sharpen your taste, not replace it.

That’s what I try to do. Not give answers. Not tell you what to do. Just help you see more clearly what you already believe, so you can make the choice that’s actually yours. That’s the value of coaches, IMHO.

Tl;Dr

Taste is the only thing that keeps you from becoming generic.

And if you lose that, you’ve lost everything that makes the work worth doing.

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Stay in control,

Gaspard