Tom Wenborn: Curating a "Creative Microbiome" Keeps Taste Alive

Soon the machines won’t just write headlines, they’ll be able to add emotion too.

Carefully chosen, well-tested emotion. They’ll know what kind of feeling is most likely to move a person, and they’ll know how to deliver it. Joy, empathy, nostalgia, picked from a list and placed with precision. It feels like Zuck and Meta are only minutes away from making me cry.

So the question won’t be whether a machine can mimic feeling. It’ll be whether it can develop something deeper… Taste. That instinctive sense that something’s off, or fresh, or bold. The thing that hits before the brain can process it.

Some creatives say they’ve got taste in their heads. A kind of mental moodboard of references, styles, and standards. Others talk about it being in the gut, instinctual, primal. Taste as nausea. Taste as butterflies. It’s less “what does this remind me of?” and more “how does this make me feel?”

That’s where the distinction lies. If AI is unbeatable at imitation, scraping, sampling, and remixing, taste might be the human ability to respond. Not just to curate, but to react. To feel the friction when something doesn’t sit right, even if you can’t explain why. To pursue the unfamiliar, not because it’s safe, but because it feels alive.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about taste as a kind of gut microbiome -- a living system shaped by what you feed it. It’s a distinct, personal opinion built up over time from the books you’ve read, the music you love, the TikToks you hate, the scenes from films you can quote and that one recipe you read that felt a little poetic and made you feel something. The wider your diet of experience, the more developed your instinct -- maybe it’s not a metaphor.

Researchers have dubbed it the “second brain.”

Your gut contains over 100 million neurons and produces a hefty chunk of your body’s serotonin. The "gut-brain" has been shown to influence everything from mood and anxiety to decision-making and risk-taking. It’s not a stretch to imagine it might also shape how we develop, perceive, and express taste.

Ever reacted to a piece of work that was immediate and hard to rationalise?

That might not be your brain talking, it might be your belly. Some ideas sit right. Others don’t. Some leave you hungry for more. Others make you queasy.

Which is why feeding your taste isn’t just about seeing more ads or collecting cooler references. It’s about exposure to a broader diet of ideas, emotions, and experiences, art, music, awkward conversations, spicy food, strange cities, bad movies. You don’t just think your taste into existence. You digest it.

Perhaps like your actual gut health, your creative microbiome can go bland and sluggish without the right input.

So maybe the challenge isn’t just to hold onto taste in the automation age, but to keep it alive, reactive, and a little bit feral.

If taste comes from deep inside, it makes sense that you can’t fake it or shortcut it. The tools around us will keep getting faster and smarter. But if we want our work to stay human, we need to protect and grow the part of us that machines can’t replicate.

Our tastebuds, wherever they are.