The End of Originality

Why AI Will Make Taste the Ultimate Creative Skill

By Liam Wade, Creative Director at FORM + FUTURE

Is originality dead? Let’s talk about that.

In the age of AI, it’s not going away—it’s evolving. Originality won’t come from starting with a blank page. It’ll come from how you combine, curate, and decide. The future favors those who can wield these tools with clarity and intent. AI isn’t replacing originality. It’s exposing who actually has it.

The Shift Is Already Happening

Right now, two creative realities are unfolding. On one side, there are artists—photographers, designers, musicians—using AI like a new instrument. I recently saw the work of a photographer in New Mexico who transitioned into AI-generated imagery. His work felt like David LaChapelle met Dali in a digital dream—vivid, surreal, and emotionally charged. It didn’t replace photography. It transformed it.

On the other side, there’s a flood of soulless content—bland, templated, and forgettable. Tools are everywhere. Taste isn’t.

When I was building the campaign for Bone, my design-driven dog collar brand, I used MidJourney to generate stylized portraits of dogs, then layered my own collars onto them in Photoshop. From there, I ran them through VSCO or Tezza, treated them like real campaigns, and published the results. That’s not cheating. That’s art direction 2.0. That shoot could’ve cost thousands and taken weeks. Instead, it became a compact, experimental system:

sketch → prompt → refine → design → publish.

And the result? Creative control. Low cost. High return.

This is what AI enables when you have taste—and a process.

Taste Is the New Edge

Taste isn’t a trend. It’s a lifetime of choices. It’s where you’ve been, what you’ve loved, what you’ve thrown away. It shows up in your references, your color palettes, your restraint. It’s not just about visuals—it’s what you say no to. It’s whether you lean toward sunlight or shadows, whether you arrange your space like a gallery or let it breathe like a song.

My taste lives in our home. I designed it with my wife—every surface, every light fixture, every material choice intentional. At the center is a Taj Mahal waterfall-slab kitchen island, the kind of object that holds a room together. To me, that’s what design is: not decoration, but a decision with gravity.

As AI continues to generate everything, your taste is what will shape what gets kept.

Tools like GPT, MidJourney, and Sora give us infinite options. But the real work—the creative work—is knowing which path to follow. When to stop. When it’s done. When you can look at it and feel: nothing more to add.

This is curation. This is editing. This is authorship.

What Creatives and Brands Need to Do Now

If you’re a creative, don’t abandon the foundation. Keep sketching. Keep walking through museums. Keep reading design books, picking up stones on trails, listening to weird jazz records. Your influences matter. But also—build systems. Sketch something. Prompt it. Refine it. Photoshop it. Treat your process like an evolving machine. Learn to engineer prompts like you would compose a layout. Be curious. Be fast. Be precise.

If you’re a founder or brand executive, understand this:

the next wave of creative leaders will be hybrids.

They won’t just design. They’ll design systems. They’ll move between analog and algorithmic without pause. They’ll make your campaigns feel both human and new.

The old guard is rolling over. The cool work is going to the people doing the cool work.

Don’t let AI make your decisions for you—but don’t ignore it either.

Direct it. Shape it. Use it to buy back time, clarity, and scale.

Sometimes that just means more hours with your family. Sometimes it means your next big idea arrives sooner.

This Is the Future Worth Designing

In the end, the future of creativity belongs to those who venture forward—bravely, openly, and without fear. Let it all in. Stir it up with everything you already know. And send something new back out into the world—something that makes people feel, connect, argue, remember.

That’s the work that matters.

That’s the future worth designing.