The new core skill you need

Hey,

Last month OpenAI president Greg Brockman tweeted “taste is a new core skill.” The internet had a field day. There’s something deeply ironic about someone helping flood the web with AI slop suddenly weighing in on taste.

But Brockman wasn’t exactly wrong. What he meant was that if you want to create something using AI that actually resonates, the human behind the machine needs cultural judgment—not just technical skill.

In music studios, artists sometimes work alongside someone known informally as the “vibe guy.” Their role is to help shape the emotional tone and feel of what’s being made. Brockman suggests that staying competitive as humans means becoming the vibe guys behind the AI.

Taste is cultural. It’s a shared sense of aesthetics, values, and signals that help people decide what feels meaningful or worth paying attention to. And right now, most people seem to agree on one thing: the vast majority of AI-generated content is, well, deeply tasteless.

That makes sense. AI has driven the cost of producing content toward zero. But as a consequence, the cost of earning real attention has skyrocketed. Authentic relevance is now in critically short supply.

The result is a media ecosystem where content increasingly exists to feed algorithms rather than move an audience. What matters isn’t how much you publish, but whether what you create becomes part of public conversation.

Cultural taste is also now a ranking factor. Large language models synthesize what’s widely referenced, shared, and discussed. As a consequence, brands that fail to generate stories or moments that travel culturally risk becoming invisible—not just to people, but to machines.

Take The Gap’s denim campaign featuring global K-pop group KATSEYE last August. You probably remember it, because it went mega-viral. It wasn’t just the partnership with the girl group that made this campaign a success, though. It was the timing. It appeared less than a month after American Eagle faced backlash over a controversial eugenics-coded denim campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney.

Gap’s campaign generated 66 million YouTube views, eclipsing American Eagle’s 11 million. The takeaway isn’t just about virality. It’s about cultural fluency. Creating an entertaining story in response to a culturally relevant moment proved far more powerful than relying on manufactured controversy.

The impact of this campaign probably had a lot to do with The Gap’s decision to hire former Paramount exec Pam Kaufmen as their Chief Entertainment Officer, a new role that’s focused on creating brand, culture, and engagement through entertainment, storytelling content, and cultural partnerships. What this new role signals is a strategic response to a deeper shift in how marketing now works.

We’re moving from an era defined by messaging, reach, and content volume into one that prioritizes meaning, relevance, and cultural participation. Storytelling that feels like culture increasingly performs better than storytelling that feels like marketing. When you create content that people genuinely care about—and stands out in an overly saturated content ecosystem—audiences will organically amplify it themselves. And as those stories spread, they shape the public discourse that AI systems later synthesize.

Obviously most brands don’t have a Gap budget to throw at a dedicated executive hire. But smaller teams can still navigate this shift. Here’s what that could look like:

• Build a team of vibe guys
  
  Experience, AI fluency, and strategic chops are still key, but a genuine interest and curiosity of modern culture and entertainment should also be a priority in hiring and talent development. Encourage your team to stay engaged with culture.
  
  
• Pick a cultural lane (and stay within it)
  
  Your brand shouldn’t engage with everything in culture. The Gap responded to a denim campaign with a denim campaign—because it made sense for the brand. Pick the conversations where your brand has real credibility or lived connection.
  
  
• Treat distribution as co-creation
  
  Cultural relevance grows when your audience participates instead of just consumes. Innovative ideas matter more than glossy execution. Publish original content, host events and collaborate with niche communities or creators that will give people something to cite, build upon, or discuss.

Successful brands in this new era will actively contribute to the conversations that shape culture.

And the rest?

Well, they’ll keep generating content into the void.

Talk soon,

Ines

‍