As someone who works with a lot of creatives, I've noticed people tend to get really defensive and self-righteous anytime "taste" comes up, on both sides - the haute designer-types vs. the scrappy I-can-do-it types. So I won't be surprised if this post is controversial. But it's insightful.

Having poor taste (or more charitably, having no taste) can be covered up or ignored by the ability to choose from a pre-curated tasteful menu of options. This is what happens when people who "hate shopping" pick a mainstream clothing brand and stick with it. Or pick a car (most of them). Or a frying pan. I've never seen an offensively ugly frying pan. You could pick one out blindfolded and end up OK 100% of the time.

But when you put a tool like generative AI into this person's hands, they are exposed. The palette of possibilities is open. The curation is on you. And if someone with taste isn't in the mix, it will ultimately become apparent when you share your creation with the world.

Having taste is one thing, having the standards to hold yourself to a certain level of quality, that's another thing altogether.

Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.

The paradox is baked in, and some of us do our best to navigate it.

I had taste before AI and I have taste now. I am not convinced by arguments like "I have noticed that people who [belief that applies to the majority of the population being discussed] also do [negative thing that is also incredibly common]" because I have taste.

“The loudest voices preaching about taste and AI are often the ones who never demonstrated taste before AI.”

Yes, and if even these people can tell that AI generated stuff is godawful and tasteless, that tells you everything you need to know about AI.

Most people equate "having taste" to "having good taste," but this article nicely illustrates that this is a false equivalence. "Having taste" simply means valuing forming one's opinions autonomously. As the author writes:

   Tasteless content [manifests] as the following:

   — Copying and pasting code without understanding it.
   — Designing websites that look exactly like every other company’s website.
   — Regurgitating content from the trending influencer of the week.

   Where’s the taste here? Where’s the critical judgment, discernment, or appreciation of aesthetic quality that separates mediocrity from excellence?

I very often hear from developers at clients I work with that code they (not me) generate with AI is not of enough "quality".

So I ask them what quality means. So far, I only get the most basic feedback: it should be in X style, pass Y linter, have N% coverage, have documentation...

At the same time, most, if not all manually written repositories do not pass the newfound quality metrics that must apply to AI code to be quality. I'm glad people are thinking about it at least, but let's not pretend like we cared before when it took manual labour. I'm even more glad we are in an age where quality standards can be fully automated.

I have been struggling with some team members who don't have taste, and amplify that via this sort of uncritical application of AI. The issue for one if them seems to be that they think the AI is perfect. They think: "If it comes up with it, it must be good/correct. If people are not using it for everything, they are wasting time doing something that the AI could do." It's frustrating to work with people like this because they rapidly produce bad results. I find it disrespectful to generate a large design document in one go, probably without even reading it, and then put it up for review, wasting the reviewers' time picking it apart. Someone "with taste" could produce something decent to begin with.

AI still a mind virus, vibe coding hasn’t taught me anything. It just allowed me to ship microservices that I dont understand. In the past I would’ve had to learn it through tutorials and docs, and in the end I would be in a better place with my new found knowledge.

But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer.

Taste is a very subjective thing, but I think in a lot of the things described in the article there is a clear better or worse. I would describe that as craftsmanship or attention to detail, more of a craft than an art.

As I get older, I'm more and more convinced that most people are just bad persons. I'm not joking.

I think this really underpins the difference between the people that say AI is useless and those that say it's enhanced many aspects of their day to day lives.

Taste is the field behind the goalposts, and we as humans are constantly expanding that field by "having taste" and developing taste as a community.

https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/taste/

I read almost half of it before just stopping and clicking away since this article is extremely surface level, but pretends not to by referring to AI usage as 'taste'. Might have missed something in the other half, but doubt it.

Eh, kind of.

In a way, AI does not change at all the problem of having taste. There are more books you'll ever read, movies you'll ever watch, games you'll ever play, software you'll ever use. I remain completely unconvinced that "dead internet/dead youtube" is a problem: you had to filter before, you have to filter now.

What AI does, being highly weird technology, is that it destroys heuristics. Good English used to be one. It used to take effort to write coherent sentences, that's now gone. Code even just compiling used to be evidence that someone at least made the effort to satisfy the type checker. That's gone as well.

I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good "bullshit detector" are now more important than ever.

I wonder if unknown /s powers persuaded us to homogenise things which ultimately suited AI training for AI to be viable.

- search engine algorithms used be be the main place of information discovery. Before 200x it would involve not using javascript for any text you wanted to be readable by a bot

- "best viewed in x browser" which happened in the late 90s and early 00s. If a website looked crap, use the other browser.

- social graph metadata. Have a better image, title, description for people who see a snippet of your page on a social network

Nowadays everything is best viewed in Chrome/Safari, Firefox does have some issues.

Google owns the majority of the search market.

Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin at least in the Western world drive most social traffic.

I would guess the 'taste' of AI has been predetermined by these strong factors on the web.

An alternative could be a DMOZ like directory with cohorts voting on the value of things, maybe with the help of AI. It does seem like the web has been 'shaped' for the past 15 years or so.

By taste we mean distinguishing pretty from ugly (or more subtly, distinguishing patterns related to that.)

Yes, there is an objective reality there. That's basically why some of us are artists and some aren't (that and self-confidence I guess).

It's what guides us when there aren't any obvious signposts around. Good artists, scientists and engineers use this faculty all the time.

Those who lack the faculty just stick to areas with lots of sign posts.

A common trend I have noticed in people who are very pro-AI is that they project their own limitations on others and pretend that they are global concerns.

First we shape our tools, then our tools shape our taste.

That's the interesting part I think. To the next generation of humans the smell of chatgpt text _may_ actually be the smell of good writing. Wouldn't that be a really interesting tragedy of the commons 2.0?

This article and title is designed to annoy/troll.

While I am not sure I actually agree with the author, I think he touched on something interesting. LLM is probably the first tool, where I consciously adapted to using it. For better or worse, it can change you and you get to pick direction of that change.

edit: As I am thinking about it more, it may be function of age. I am picking up some additional hobbies now and my whole approach has become much more intentional in general.

To be fair to early comparison between cooking and chefs. Most chefs are largely mediocre, and the ones that are glorified are fine in their restaurant but do not try their recipes at home either - overly complicated with 50 ingredients for a 30 minute dinner and too much technique for it to be practical.

Just because you like something very few people like, doesn't mean you have better/more taste than them.

Excellent, excellent article. I do have one (odd) question though.

Perhaps I'm in a bubble (or outside of a bubble), but I don't know what the opening premise of this article is talking about. Namely:

> There’s been an influx of people telling others to develop taste to use AI. Designers. Marketers. Developers. All of them touting the same message.

I have not seen this influx. I have never heard anyone telling others to "develop taste to use AI". I work with & talk to a lot of developers, designers, marketers across a span of areas so this seems surprising to me. I've talked to outright skeptics, blind fanatics & some in between - the discussions with those "in betweeners" tend to centre more around functional contributions of AI as an aid rather than it's "creative output" & our judgements of same. I have yet to encounter anyone who has strong thoughts on taste w.r.t. AI beyond the polar extremes of "AI can do my creativity for me" & "only use AI for explicitly functional non-taste-related tasks".

Am I the only one missing this influx?

Ironically this article reads like it was written by AI.

This "taste" concept has overlap with conscientiousness, a trait that companies look for when hiring. But, it is hard to develop.

Not without irony that the author finishes with:

> The people succeeding with AI aren’t the ones who suddenly discovered taste. They’re the ones who already had it and simply adapted their standards to a new tool.

Which is just about the most blatant “it’s not about x it’s about y” tropes that AI writing is drowning in.

I do appreciate that they gave some concrete advice on how to curate taste…

Seems like most of the 'tasteless' habits in the article are also just laziness.

Well that’s true especially with generative art, mashups are generally without regard to taste or aesthetics.

On the other hand deliberately tasteless art is a thing, it’s a bit in the eye of the beholder.

It’s true that many musicians cater to people who don’t really like music, they want to hear a good story with a beat. And that’s fine.

To have taste is to have developed a point of view, it’s not a mystical gift, it’s something you can develop over time. And not everyone needs that.

AI just lets us do the same things but faster

if you had bad taste, your taste is just badder faster

i think this is why so far there hasnt been any real moment of innovation from AI

because its not doing anything new. same crap as before just faster

De gustibus non est disputandum.

It feels like piling on to impugn the taste of the community that went ape for NFT profile pics just a few years ago.

A lot of people are picking apart the many problematic parts of this, but I'll choose to target "Regurgitating content from the trending influencer of the week."

This is fundamentally how humans work. Our civilization is far too large and complex for you to be a bona fide expert in everything. And even worse, the more time you spend dedicated to expertise in one thing, the less well rounded you are in the ~infinity other things.

So what do you do if you cannot have authentic "taste" in everything?

You trust people. You find "influencers" that seem to succeed and have knowledge and you trust their opinion.

In practice, the vast majority of everything we think and do are not because of our personal expertise, but because of our un-expert belief in other people who do these things. Taste isn't just a measure of your personal expertise, but a measure of your ability to find and listen to experts.

So to call this out as a negative is harmful. You need to assemble a group of influencers not just professionally, but in every part of your life, who themselves are experts and can lend you their taste so you can make decisions without the paralysis of needing personal expertise in all things. That, or you need infinite time to become an infinite expert.

I'm not a fan of this clickbaity trend where the author pretends everyone else is as insufferably boring as they are in order to have an argument.

One more thing to add to the list of tasteless: telling other they’re not doing AI right.

fomo is not taste.

> There’s been an influx of people telling others to develop taste to use AI.

Can someone point out where this influx is happening?

The author doesn’t provide any references to this trend so I’m a bit confused why this is a big issue, as it’s literally the first time I’ve ever heard of it

The whole concept of "taste" being important bothers me, frankly. It's often implied that it's some objective thing, when it's really purely subjective. I accept that it's important socially to present as someone "with good taste", but I genuinely feel any effort in this direction is really just a huge waste of time.

Why not just enjoy the things you enjoy? And if the things you enjoy drift over time as you experience more and notice more patterns then fine, but this does not mean the new enjoyable thing is in any objective sense better then the old.

Finally, I'm completely fine with a website that looks "exactly like every other website".

this discussion about taste and ai is annoying. the world was conformist even before ai. most web design before 2023 was conformist, most pop music was boring, most writing was cliché, corporate speak was already retarded. ai didn't invent banality: we had plenty of it before.

why everybody is just repeating safe things, instead of expressing themselves... ai is not en explanation. we should have interrogated ourselves about the whys this happens. complaining about AI is, again, missing the point.

So much AI propaganda, like this article, is both AI slop itself while being so weirdly aggressive.

You could say that propaganda authors had more taste back in my day.