The Rise of Mediocrity and the Death of the Real Turd

There is a common criticism right now that AI is causing the enshittification of everything. The argument is that by giving everyone access to these tools, we are flooding the world with bad writing, bad design, bad art, bad code, bad everything. And I understand the criticism. There is a lot of AI slop out there. There is a lot of work that has the unmistakable smell of the machine on it.

But I think there is another possibility worth considering.

What if AI is not making everything worse? What if AI is making it harder to remember what truly bad work looks like?

For a long time, mediocrity was easy to spot because there was a visible gap between professional-level work and everything else. You could usually tell when something had been made by a person who really knew the tools. The design had better spacing. The code had better structure. The copy had more polish. The presentation simply felt more finished. That did not always mean the professional had better ideas or better taste. Sometimes they did, of course, but often the difference was much simpler: they knew how to get the thing out of their head and onto the screen.

That was the great bottleneck before AI. A lot of people had interesting ideas, and a lot of people had good taste, but there was a real distance between what they could imagine and what they could actually produce. If you wanted to become a great designer, you had to learn Illustrator, Photoshop, Figma, typography, layout, color, export settings, and all the strange little quirks of the tools. If you wanted to become a great programmer, you had to learn languages, architecture, databases, frameworks, deployment, debugging, and all the hidden details that separate something that technically works from something that works well. The tools were not just tools. They were gates.

I do not think those tools are irrelevant now. In many ways, they matter more than ever at the highest level. But for a lot of people, the act of learning the tool well enough to express the idea was the thing that stopped them. It took years. Sometimes it took decades. Sometimes they simply never got there.

I have felt this myself most clearly with graphic design. I can see something in my head. I can know the feeling I want. I can recognize when something is wrong. But then I open Illustrator and the idea gets trapped somewhere between my taste and the interface. I do not know where the little feature is nested. I do not know the right workflow. I do not know why the thing is snapping strangely or why the export looks wrong or why what I made is close, but not quite alive.

That used to be the wall. Now the wall is lower.

With AI, I can ask where the tool is. I can ask how to use it. I do not have to sift through a seventeen-minute YouTube video to find the thirty seconds I needed. And in many cases, I can skip parts of the tool entirely. I can describe what I want in plain English and have the machine attempt to make it. That is not a small change. Plain English has become a creative interface.

Of course, describing what you want is its own skill. Knowing what to ask for is not easy. Knowing the correct terminology for what you want still requires learning. Describing what is wrong with the output is not easy. Having enough taste to reject the first decent answer is not easy. But the old technical barrier between taste and execution has started to collapse, and that is changing the nature of mediocrity itself.

The strange thing happening now is that almost everyone can produce work that looks sort of professional. The floor has been raised. What used to look impressive a few years ago now looks ordinary. What used to be good enough to get someone paid now feels like something a reasonably capable person could generate in an afternoon. The work is clean. The lighting is nice. The typography is decent. The code runs. The copy is polished. The deck looks like a deck. The product mockup looks like a product mockup.

And yet somehow, it all feels mediocre.

That is the important distinction. AI has not filled the world only with garbage. Garbage is obvious. Garbage announces itself. What AI has done is more subtle. It has filled the world with things that are pretty good. Pretty good writing. Pretty good design. Pretty good code. Pretty good strategy. Pretty good branding. Pretty good images. Pretty good interfaces. Pretty good everything.

Pretty good is becoming invisible.

Think about the old local furniture store commercial that somehow became a meme. The yellow hue to the lighting. The lo-fi audio. The owner is yelling at you from a warehouse with their arms outstretched. The transitions are insane. The jingle sounds like it was recorded in a basement by someone’s cousin. It is so bad that it becomes funny because we couldn’t imagine someone paying for something that bad, much less proudly broadcasting it on television.

Or think about the flyer that comes home from your kid’s school. Not the clean Canva flyer. I mean the old kind. The Microsoft Word flyer. Three different fonts. Arial, Comic Sans, and then some strange display font with wavy letters. Clip art in the corner. A sparkly dot-matrix border. A random assortment of various colors. Text centered for no reason. A random stretched image where all the children’s faces look like they were pressed in a flat iron.

That stuff was everywhere.

The wedding video with the square fade in and out. The church bulletin with twelve fonts. The public access commercial. The restaurant menu with every item given the same visual importance. The small business website with a background texture, a drop shadow, a spinning logo, and a contact form that may or may not work. Or what about the old 90s drug-free commercials. That was not the edge case. That was a huge amount of everyday design.

And a whole class of professional design existed, in part, to make things not look like that.

A lot of baseline professional work was simply the ability to play the greatest hits. Use fewer fonts. Give things space. Align the elements. Pick colors that do not fight each other. Make the headline readable. Do not stretch the image. Do not use every transition. Do not make the logo spin. Do not center everything. Do not turn the flyer into a ransom note.

That was valuable work. It still is. But AI has learned to default to pretty good. It has learned the design equivalent of pop music. It knows how to give you a pretty good rhythm, a pretty good hook, a pretty good chorus, a pretty good bridge. It knows how to make something clean, balanced, and familiar. It knows how to play the greatest hits of acceptable taste. In fact, you’d have to put in work to get it to produce something as horrendous as that clip-art school flyer.

So maybe the problem is not that everything is turning into shit. Maybe the problem is that we do not see real turds in the wild anymore.

The bottom has been lifted. The truly chaotic, spectacularly bad work is disappearing from many parts of life because the person who would have made the Microsoft Word flyer can now ask Claude or ChatGPT or Canva or any number of tools to make something that looks pretty good. The person who would have made the unwatchable commercial can now use templates, AI voiceover, automated editing, image generation, and script assistance to produce something that at least clears the floor.

That is a strange kind of progress. It means the world may actually get less ugly in certain obvious ways. Fewer ransom-note flyers. Fewer broken layouts. Fewer unreadable menus. Fewer small businesses with websites that look like they were designed inside a printer settings dialog.

But it also means we lose a certain clarity. When bad was bad, good was easier to identify. You could point to the bad thing and say, “Not that.” You could point to the professional thing and say, “That.” Now the bad thing often looks decent. The amateur work looks professional enough. The average has been dressed up. Mediocrity has learned spacing.

This is why the conversation around AI and taste is more complicated than simply saying AI makes everything worse. In many cases, AI makes the worst work better. It raises the floor. But by raising the floor, it also raises the standard. The old version of “good” starts to feel like the new version of “fine.”

And fine is where things go to disappear.

We are already developing a sensitivity to this. We say, “That looks like AI,” or “That sounds like AI,” or “That feels like AI.” But the strange part is that a lot of this work would have looked professional not very long ago. It would have been considered decent work, maybe even strong work. It would have passed. It would have impressed a client. It would have helped someone get hired. Now it has the smell of the average.

That is what AI produces by default: the average. A large language model is not dreaming in the way a person dreams. It is not remembering the first movie that changed you, the song your father played in the car, the strange shape of a restaurant sign from your childhood, or the way a certain book rearranged your sense of the world. It is moving from token to token by probability. It is excellent at producing the next likely thing. That is useful, but the next likely thing is rarely the unforgettable thing.

This is where taste becomes even more important, not less. There is a story a professor once told me about Hampshire College. As I remember it, the point was that they did not organize education around traditional grades in the same way most schools do. The work was more project-based, more qualitative, more centered around the thing itself. His belief was that when you eliminate grades, you can actually raise the standard because now there is not an A, B, C, D, and F. There is great work, and then there is everything else.

That idea always stuck with me because grades create a strange comfort. You get a B and move on. You tell yourself it was good enough. In school, maybe it was. But the world does not really work that way. The world does not care that you got a B. The world cares whether anyone stops, whether anyone notices, whether anyone feels something, whether anyone remembers.

We are entering a similar moment with creative work. When everyone can produce something that looks pretty good, pretty good stops mattering. The new division is not between amateur and professional. The new division is between average and alive. That is a much harder division because professional polish is no longer enough. Looking clean is no longer enough. Sounding articulate is no longer enough. Having a nice logo, a nice deck, a nice landing page, a nice app, a nice image, or a nice paragraph is no longer enough.

The question is not simply, “Does this look professional?” The question is, “Does this feel like it came from somewhere?” Does it carry a point of view? Does it make a connection I would not have made on my own? Does it draw from a life, not just a dataset? Does it have taste?

This is why I think the people who stand out in the AI era will not simply be the people who use AI the most, nor the people with generally accepted good taste. Because AI does generally accepted taste by default. What it can’t do is bring together your unique perspective on the world and produce something novel. The most successful people will need to develop a unique taste. They will be the people who read strange books, watch old films, listen to music outside the algorithm, study architecture, notice menus, remember packaging, care about chairs, pay attention to language, and collect references from the real world. Their advantage will not just be that they know how to prompt. Their advantage will be that they have something worth prompting from.

Novelty does not come from asking the machine to be novel. Novelty comes from forcing unlikely worlds to collide. It comes from bringing together ideas that would not naturally sit next to each other: a product inspired by an old camera and a Japanese lunchbox, a landing page with the pacing of a sermon and the design of a punk record, a software interface that feels less like SaaS and more like a well-made tool from a hardware store. That is where the human being matters.

The machine can help produce. It can help execute. It can help explore variations. It can help you get past the blank page, the empty canvas, or the intimidating tool. But it cannot care for you. It cannot decide what is worth preserving. It cannot know which references belong together unless you bring them to the table.

This is the opportunity hiding underneath all the anxiety. AI lowers the execution barrier, but it raises the taste barrier. It makes mediocre work easier to produce, but it also makes truly excellent work more obvious. When everything looks acceptable, the exceptional becomes louder. When everything is polished, soul becomes the differentiator. When everyone can make something that looks professional, the only thing left is to make something that feels alive.

Producing something different yet delightful is still as difficult as it has ever been. Maybe more difficult. Because now you are not competing against people who cannot use the tools. You are competing against a world where everyone has access to competence.

That means competence is no longer the moat. Taste is. Point of view is. Life is.

The barrier is no longer learning where the tool is hidden in the software. The barrier is knowing what is worth making in the first place. And for the people who can answer that question, AI is not the end of creativity. It is the removal of an old excuse.

Now the idea can get out. Which means the idea has to be better.