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The Most Important Skill in the AI Era? Taste, Says Wharton Expert ...
By Polly Thompson You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Westend61/Getty Images 2026-05-04T11:55:08.178Z Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and AI expert, said good taste is a key skill in the AI era. Mollick said on a podcast that standing out from AI-generated work matters. Tech leaders are debating whether "taste" is the next essential AI-era skill. Good taste is about well-cut clothes, chic interiors and, in the AI era, a potential strategy for standing out at work. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor told the April 30 episode of "The Education Equation with Jeremy Singer" that the technology is creating a "fundamental existential challenge" over how different kinds of intelligence are valued. As that shift happens, "having a sense of style actually matters," Mollick, the author of "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI," said.In a world where most writing online is AI-generated and everything begins to sound the same, someone who can write with a "unique style ends up being more interesting," he said.As generative AI has begun to enter the workplace, anxieties have centered on technical fields such as computer science and finance, which are seen as highly exposed to AI job displacement.Some workers are finding reassurement in the idea that "human" skills, such as judgment, critical thinking, and communication, will remain harder to automate.But Mollick said on the podcast that even some of those traditional "durable skills" can now be partly outsourced to AI."Those durable skills still seem durable, but they're also outsourceable to a degree they never were before," he said."There's enough studies that say the AI gives pretty good critical thinking. It gives you pretty good answers on ethical situations that ethicists would agree with," he said, adding that they will only get better with time.Mollick's comments chime with what's become a topic of debate among some tech leaders in 2026 — whether taste is a key differentiator in the AI-powered workplace.In February, Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said that "taste is a new core skill," while Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham posted on X: "When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make."However, Nan Yu, head of product at Linear, wrote on X that "you probably don't have better taste than AI."He added: "There are plenty of other distinctly human things that we can contribute, but 'having better tas...
Teach Your Students That AI Is More Than an Answer Machine
Popular Topics Popular Topics Podcasts Videos Press Releases Back to Heinemann.com Search Adapted from A Teacher’s Guide to Using AI by Meenoo Rami.Many young people encounter AI as a means of finishing their work or finding answers, but that kind of surface-level use limits both curiosity and growth. Wharton Teaching Your Students to Use AI professors Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick call this form of using AI a tool. They go on to outline six additional roles AI can play in student learning: a tutor (providing direct, interactive instruction), a coach (providing reflection on a recent experience to promote metacognition), a mentor (providing feedback), a teammate (either helping team members recognize and leverage each other’s strengths or playing devil’s advocate to help teams improve their plans), a simulator (providing a role-play partner), and a student (providing an opportunity for the user to act as teacher, a role that can help users solidify their own understanding of a topic) (Mollick and Mollick 2023). The Mollicks acknowledge that none of these models are perfect. The limitations of today’s AI technology means that they may include errors, for example, but they can still be helpful tools. When you help students see AI as flexible and context-dependent, you set the stage for thoughtful, purposeful engagement. When your students start to see AI as something they can shape, challenge, and learn from, they begin to understand that they are the ones in control. You are not just teaching them how to use AI. You are helping them grow into learners who can navigate uncertainty, adapt to new tools, and stay rooted in human insight and integrity. You’re inviting your students in the safety of your classroom to try out the variety of roles AI can play in their learning experiences in and out of the classroom. To help your students consider fresh ways in which AI can help them, you might use these approaches: Model how students can use AI in a role other than as a tool. As part of a unit review, you might prompt a chatbot to act as a student, asking your real-life students to help you teach the bot about the concepts from the unit. When preparing students for a debate, you might have the chatbot act as a simulator in the role of students’ debate opponents.Remind students to maintain a healthy skepticism regarding AI’s responses. It’s one thing to be skeptical of AI in the abstract. It’s something else to be skeptical of AI when it’s role-playing a ...
On Taste, Moats, & Who is Washing the Dishes - LinkedIn
The majority of people will be the dishwashers and line cooks of the AI taste economy: essential, invisible, and largely absent from the conversation about what good looks like.
Agentic AI Shows Strong Judgment in Long Tasks | AI News Detail
According to emollick, agentic models now display strong judgment enabling complex, long-run tasks, reshaping human-AI roles, as reported by Twitter. In a thought-provoking tweet dated April 29, 2026, Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School and expert on AI's impact on work, argued that ...


