This is a practical guide for getting paid by building impeccable taste in a world drowning in slop. I'll teach you how to completely rewire your brain for the next decade that's coming for your entire life, the person who could “make things” was getting paid: the developer, the writer, the producer, the designer now a machine makes the thing in seconds, so decision making is now 100x more valuable than building... deciding what to make, what's good, what your audience should even see if you write, publish, design, or run any kind of audience, this shift is already touching your income... so this piece stays practical: what taste has to become, the daily method, and four ways it pays before anything else, my definition of slop: machine output that nobody pushed back on it doesn't need to look robotic... the biggest mistake would be thinking that because it looks human, it isnt slop smooth, correct, pleasant work that nobody shaped is the purest slop there is... including yours, if you ship what the model hands you untouched everyone is publishing, nobody is buying on Deezer, songs made fully by AI can be more than 50% of everything delivered on a given day... and all of those songs together get between 1-3% of the listening half of what comes in, almost none of what gets played books are going the same way... way more releases since AI writing tools arrived, and the average book getting read less than before so people didn't boycott AI content, and the flood didn't win either... what broke is simpler: it got hard to find anything good the expensive part is no longer making the thing, it's knowing which piece is worth your next twenty minutes and here's the strange detail that tells you what readers actually want: in blind tests, people can't pick the AI-written story out of a lineup... sometimes they even like it more but the second a creator says they used AI, readers trust them less that only makes sense once you see the real question readers ask... never what wrote this, always did anyone care about this before sending it to me?
did someone have a reason to make it, did someone read it before shipping, did someone throw away the bad versions a flood of auto-published content fails that question by definition, because auto-published means nobody was choosing... the machine can type it, someone still has to care about it so your reader is buried, and buried people pay whoever digs them out... every way to make money in this piece comes from that line taste means writing your rules down taste used to mean a good eye... you look at ten finished things and point at the best one that eye is losing value fast, because finished things went from rare to infinite, and pointing at good work stops being special when there are a million things to point at the taste that pays now is different: your rules, written down, before the work exists why written? because a model predicts the most expected next word, so its natural output is the most average possible version of anything generate and hit publish, and each piece looks a little cleaner while your whole catalog drifts toward what everyone else is publishing with the same model you won't feel it on any single draft... you only see it when you read your last twenty pieces in a row and realize they could have come from anyone written rules are the counterweight, and here's what mine look like before my agents write anything: