odomojuli
4 hours ago
Emily Segal has excellent reporting on 'tasteslop'
https://nemesisglobal.substack.com/p/tasteslop
More practically, people who work at AI startups are starting to realize that money and power can't fix everything and they are being met with hostility.
I have met several people working at frontier labs who legitimately feel that what they are doing is making the world a worse place and that a disgusting amount of money is not enough to assuage their apprehensions. They cannot even look people in the eye and tell them what they do. Maybe shame is good op-sec.
You've all managed to successfully alienate the entire creative class.
In any case, C-suite has realized that the regulatory regime depends on public consumer sentiment. The current range of products do not pacify the masses. There is a real, visceral feeling that these tools are polluting the world around us with low-quality media with malicious purposes by a growing cadre of vying interests.
pls-dnt-deploy
3 hours ago
Great article, I loved it! A few parts will stay with me.
The Idiosyncrasy dimension seems to be what I was missing the most. That relative and social aspect beyond discernment and pattern recognition.
This is the powerful quote, because taste wasn't a top concern until mass production appeared: "Tech’s surging obsession with taste is therefore not really about aesthetics; it reflects a deep anxiety about whether economic capital can capture cultural capital at the exact moment cultural capital becomes crucial for technology’s distribution, relevance, and differentiation."
Thanks!!!