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.
Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes.
If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants.
So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste.
And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means success" but "this style means you have good taste".
Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing. Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they were "tasteful".
Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim.
Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective only by those who cannot see it.
Elements of taste are subjective. Not all of it. You recognize this yourself in your own area of skill. Everyone has one area where suddenly they agree not every opinion has equal merit, and can articulate why.
But move out of that subject and into one of their blind spots, and we’re right back to “that’s just taste, taste is subjective, taste changes over time.”
Subjectivity is the refuge of the tasteless, who can afford to let others do our thinking for us. GP was right on point in that regard.
> Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements
The gap between practitioners and bystanders is wide.
There was a "AI art or human art" quiz posted on HN [0]. I got > 90% right while the median score was 60%. I thought I was good at telling AI-generated content and was proud of myself.
Last week I listened to music on a random channel Youtube pushed to me for hours without realizing they're all AI-generated.
In turns out it's not that I have a human's soul or something. It's just that I practiced digital painting before but not music production.
Isn't that just a lot of words to say "my taste is objective / rooted in reason, other people's tastes are a crapshoot"?
Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"?
Sure, there are things we do in a particular way because of manufacturability or utility considerations, and that stays pretty stable in the long haul. We put windows in homes in specific places and make them rectangular. But that's not taste, that's practicality. Everything else changes dramatically from one decade to another.
When you spend a lifetime learning design you learn the difference between taste and fashion. Taste is the ability to make solid choices coherently within a system being it fashionable or not.
Fashion is just the latest system that is popular.
Tasteful people can design good things regardless of the fashionable era. Great ones can create new fashionable eras.
More examples: look up Dieter Rams (a person). Ran into the name a while back, and man- he made a record player 50yrs+ ago and it was never meant to be in fashion. It sure would still fit in as "simple device that does X" in the 2020's.
I don't disagree. Taste is dynamic. One distinction I'm making is that there are tastemakers and tastetakers. And they are not the same.
The dynamism can come in different ways as well. For example, the tastemaker can change their mind. Or, gen pop can change who they look up to as arbiters of taste.
There seems to be an element of familiarity too. What was considered 'cool' when one is a teenager becomes an anchor of sorts. Even if society moves on, there will be a cohort who holds on to the era which made the deepest impression on them.
You nailed it here. having 'taste' is a completely subjective concept driven mostly by the 'market-makers' of whatever industry. Your 'taste' is determined by the judgment of others.
No. Tastes are subjective; beauty is objective. This is what permits us to say whether someone has good or bad taste. If it were purely subjective, then it would be impossible to make these claims. They would be nothing more than expressions of power, whether by the majority or some authority.
Fads and fashions occur, sure, but they aren't always aligned with good taste. And you can have varieties of beauty (why can't two different styles both be beautiful in two different ways?). I also wouldn't exaggerate the divergence. Some of what you've written is cliche rather than history.
Unity, the true, the good, and the beautiful are but three different perspectives on being and a matter of objective reality. The discernment or subjective condition of the tastes of a person have to do with how one receives reality rather than reality itself. Reality is, after all, received according to the mode of the receiver.
Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer.
The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including reducing dependence on ordering/positions of arguments.
On the other hand, apart from a few odd GUI disasters, it seems every piece of software I've used that has a UI I hate has had one or more designers behind it.
Is there even a "haute couture" school of design for interfaces other than GUIs? Are there designers who design for the experiences of people who are visually impaired short of totally blind? It seems to me that virtually no trained designers care about what actually makes computing experiences useful or pleasant for me, let alone beautiful. (And they often devote an inordinate amount of energy to things I'd say don't matter at all.)
I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.
I haven't read the article, so just speaking generally...
(and not meaning to contradict you, just thinking aloud)
I think there's some overlap between "taste" and "thinking for yourself" — though they are not the same thing.
Lots of people don't want to think for themselves in every teeny aspect of life, so choosing from a menu of "good enough" options is reasonable. It doesn't mean they lack taste, just that they lack the energy/interest/etc in that moment for that activity.
Another aspect: plenty of people will know whether they like something when they see it, but they won't be able to describe what they want beforehand. So, they have taste (ability to choose a good one), but not an ability to enunciate it, or conjure it out of thin air.
Also, the "taste" terminology is often intertwined with "style", and I think that's unnecessarily limiting. An "engineer's taste" might help them decide between gadgets and gizmos, based on their merits, even if they're both ugly.
To your last example, I think modern Lodge cast iron frying pans are mediocre. Not because of ugliness/prettiness, but because the sharp ridge/seam on the handle from the casting process is not ground down. It makes it uncomfortable to hold. Also, the cooking surface is left rough. Compare it to an old Griswold — miles apart, according to my tastes. They're both handsome enough to look at, though.
The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings. Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even know they’ve lost taste for a significant amount of time.
I would argue that if you can't make a profit you have shown you are tasteless. If other people don't enjoy it enough to pay you, that says a lot about how out of step you are.
If I were to bet on whether the critical consensus or some random person on HN had no taste, I would certainly bet on the latter. This post reeks of "Am I wrong? No! It is the artists, critics, collectors, and community who are wrong!"
Profit is “how much your whole is more valuable than the sum of parts it consists of”. If your taste is what makes it valuable, then more profits reflect more taste.
Monopoly profits are the allure of innovation. Its the same reason those life-saving medicines get developed (patents).
Why is this a bad thing? Personally Id rather have an Apple monopoly than MSFT for instance. I really love using my Apple products. I never enjoyed using a single MSFT product.
A lot of open source developer don't get paid for their work, but their stuff is often used by everyone. There has to be a 'will to make it profitable'.
in order for anything to become truly profitable its uniqueness must be quantified and integrated into existing power structures, it must be expressly oriented towards fulfilling the needs/desires of the largest amount of people for the least amount of expenditure. Profitability IS intrinsically distasteful. Market forces, online ecosystems etc, quickly strip away any idiosyncratic features present in a viral trend, they aggressively select for sticking power, everything tends toward uniformity. This is closely linked with the process of reification.
It's tracking, micro targeting, retargeting, and trying to sell me a fridge that I literally just bought while I'm off reading about sailboats that's intrusive.
Advertise shoes, cleats, sails, and charters in the Bahamas while I'm doing that, not singles near me and bicycles because I posted in a Facebook group.
Advertising and public relations has always been applied psychology. The contemporary interation was originally developed by Freuds nephew (Edward Bernays).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Only for modern definitions of advertising, mind you, which are all about dark patterns and invasive marketing, rather than putting a descrption of your product out there that can be searched by interested parties looking to buy a product like yours.
There were times were advertising was useful and desirable, e.g. Small Ads pages.
There was also a time when ads were a single unintrusive scrolling line, curated by the website owner so as to be relevant to their audience. Those were fine.
That phrase has always seemed a bit wishful to me, like when Christians describe our era as the end times or when crypto people say "it's still early days".
Yeah I think there is probably plenty more pain to come. I mean, we don't even have corporate controlled governments yet. Although that seems to be coming real soon.
How do consumers discover new products and services if not through advertising? A product on a shelf at a store is also a form of advertising proven by how much money is spent on packaging. Word of mouth is also one of the most effective forms of advertising.
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do
Why's that? Profit, of course, is just the measure of how much trade is undelivered.
The old: I give you my corn to feed your chickens, and at some point in the future you will give me chickens in return once they are fed and grown. The amount of undelivered chickens are my profit. But eventually you will provide the chickens as promised, theoretically. Fair trade doesn't seem tasteless.
And if I forever hold on to that profit and never expect you to give me the chickens in the future as you originally promised, then I literally gave you the corn for free. How could it be tasteless to help someone out by giving them something for free?
Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all the insane laws that surround it.
Pretty good comment. It's a spectrum right? So if you went all in on profits you are likely all in on tastelessness. If you profit a small amount your probably only shedding a bit of your taste.
However I would wager the argument many people have is that they view their professional life as not utilizing their taste and that is reserved for decisions in their private lives (for those who still keep the two relatively distinct). For those who have truly merged professional and personal and gone all in profit -- original point probably stands. Thats pretty tasteless!
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
This needs some justification. Profits are what you get when you can do something for less than you charge for it, and be competitive. To not be good enough to make profit you need to be able to force money out of people e.g. with taxes.
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.
OTOH I read the success rate is only 50-50 at detecting it. AI text does leave some clues, like those infamous em dashes, but those can be patched with some simple edits. AI images are more obvious because many are intentionally overwrought.
It depends on what the AI is trying to do. If you write a novel and ask the AI to improve the prose it becomes very obvious if you've dealt with AI prose before.
The quoted part is really amazing. The author of the article just makes claims and clearly hasn't been exposed to any real art or music education. I suppose to some extent he means taste in programming, but anyone who is writing such an article does not have that either.
We can also talk about taste in articles, which seems to have degenerated to "any pro-AI article will be voted up and defended".
I'm not sure if this counts as a pro-AI article, but I agree. It's void of substance.
The most ironic part:
> When someone preaches about AI taste, ask them to show you their work from before AI. If they can’t demonstrate taste in their pre-AI work, they’re not qualified to lecture you about it now.
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?
Good taste/bad taste is a subjective function of societal consensus, but having taste/not having taste is objective: you either think for yourself or you don't. Furthermore, the two are uncorrelated: one can have a very strong sense of taste but have it commonly regarded as "bad taste." Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be perceived as having "good taste."
> Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be perceived as having "good taste."
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.
>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... 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 don't think I've ever worked anywhere that'd accept a PR which introduced untested & undocumented features, in which the code doesn't even pass the company's internal linter.
Those feel like very low bars for your colleagues & clients to set.
> 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.
That's because I trust the code that I write to have quality, because I wrote it, which means I understand it. I may choose not to test something because I am certain that nothing can go wrong with it.
When your repository is thousands of lines of code written by an AI with tendencies to forget critical components, duplicate work, make bonkers editing errors that shuffles everything around to all the wrong places, and invent packages out of thin air, you need a system of accountability.
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.
Our societies incentivize a bunch of bad behaviors, especially when it comes to projecting the appearance of productivity. So I find that unsurprising.
I'm not Catholic, but I recognize the seven deadly sins as valid moral precepts by any measure. Capitalism advocates for all of them excepting sloth. Get to work.
I think especially in the US, we've really normalized and to a degree even celebrate and rewarded being a tactless jerk who cuts corners or worse as long as they get what they want (usually money).
Doing hard work for better(quality, moral etc) results is very out of fashion.
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.
Yes. The people who had low standards in the first place find it transformative.
If you have high standards, its regurgitating info in an ill disciplined fashion. Because its input isn't really of the highest standard upon which the model is trained on.
It regurgitates info in a way that is very specific to what and how you requested it. If you ask it a question already having an estimate of how accurate its answers will be, you can get a lot of value from it.
Nope, Ive tested its understanding on things like corporate finance which I know very deeply.
It touches surface level stuff - which makes sense, most stuff on the internet is surface level. Good enough to pass an exam (since exams are essentially memorisation and regurigation of that nowadays) but not enough depth of understanding to be able to apply it in a wide range of contexts.
The application is where all the value is in the real world.
Surface level is where you can find the most day to day value. Just today I've used it to get advice about putting up a treehouse, rough price ranges and differences between fridges, common fridge widths, adding second accounts to microG, command flags to identify slow tests, poe support for my wifi router, differences in laser measurement devices, french translation, medication storage, different types of olive, and drafting 3 emails in another language. All of this would have taken me way longer without these tools, I'm confident it gave good results because I know that the information exists and is common.
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.
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.
There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those parameters :-) .
Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often, that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.
I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing (financially) is good marketing.
<< I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good "bullshit detector" are now more important than ever.
Yes. Oddly, for once, English majors may actually benefit, because they may be better prepared than most to prepare prompts for the jobs of tomorrow ( mild sarcasm, coffee didn't kick in yet ).
You laugh, but I'm seen as a local/regional expert at prompt engineering in my field because of my background in technical and creative writing learned as an English major. People pay me to help them understand these tools and how to use them in their work. All I'm doing with them is logic and communication.
I have zero idea how the tools work, I'm just really good at communicating in a clear and concise manner when I need to.
Honest go god, if I laugh in this instance, it is because a good thing is happening for relatively dumb reasons ( it is the same thing with documentation -- all of a sudden, good documentation is required so that AI can go through it ).
I remain convinced that it is those who studied/have a passion for the humanities and liberal arts that will be leading the charge of future product innovation.
With all due respect with pure technologists, they just dont understand people, what they need, and how to envision/communicate the benefits.
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.
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?
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.
Fair point, but I did not attempt to integrate google search into my processes or workflow ( shows what I know about future predictions ), because while it was useful and did provide access to information, it was obviously limited in a sense that it could only take a mule like me to the water.
I don't want to delve into specifics, because it is a public forum. But the difference between learning google syntax and llm handling ( which I suppose would include prompt engineering ) should not be understated.
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.
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".
> 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…
I mean another way to think about it is - eating artificially produced food.
What happens when you consume it? Your taste for good stuff is eroded away - somehow, the artificial crap is acceptable. Most notably because of its lower price.
The same phenonomon with food, will prevail with information.
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.
Just like with Youtubers, people will stop these practices when people stop clicking on them.
It’s very easy for us to tell people to just not do that stuff, but I can tell you from my podcast production days that these annoying trends are often the difference between a 20% rise and a 20% drop in audience. No different than a clever book title turning heads.
To be clear, I find most of these trends incredibly obnoxious and I hated indulging them.
> 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.
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.
Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes.
If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants.
So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste.
And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means success" but "this style means you have good taste".
Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing. Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they were "tasteful".
Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim.
It's all peer pressure, all social status.
Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective only by those who cannot see it.
Elements of taste are subjective. Not all of it. You recognize this yourself in your own area of skill. Everyone has one area where suddenly they agree not every opinion has equal merit, and can articulate why.
But move out of that subject and into one of their blind spots, and we’re right back to “that’s just taste, taste is subjective, taste changes over time.”
Subjectivity is the refuge of the tasteless, who can afford to let others do our thinking for us. GP was right on point in that regard.
> Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements
The gap between practitioners and bystanders is wide.
There was a "AI art or human art" quiz posted on HN [0]. I got > 90% right while the median score was 60%. I thought I was good at telling AI-generated content and was proud of myself.
Last week I listened to music on a random channel Youtube pushed to me for hours without realizing they're all AI-generated.
In turns out it's not that I have a human's soul or something. It's just that I practiced digital painting before but not music production.
[0]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar...
Isn't that just a lot of words to say "my taste is objective / rooted in reason, other people's tastes are a crapshoot"?
Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"?
Sure, there are things we do in a particular way because of manufacturability or utility considerations, and that stays pretty stable in the long haul. We put windows in homes in specific places and make them rectangular. But that's not taste, that's practicality. Everything else changes dramatically from one decade to another.
The short answer to your question is "no". The long answer is "read Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance".
When you spend a lifetime learning design you learn the difference between taste and fashion. Taste is the ability to make solid choices coherently within a system being it fashionable or not.
Fashion is just the latest system that is popular.
Tasteful people can design good things regardless of the fashionable era. Great ones can create new fashionable eras.
More examples: look up Dieter Rams (a person). Ran into the name a while back, and man- he made a record player 50yrs+ ago and it was never meant to be in fashion. It sure would still fit in as "simple device that does X" in the 2020's.
I don't disagree. Taste is dynamic. One distinction I'm making is that there are tastemakers and tastetakers. And they are not the same.
The dynamism can come in different ways as well. For example, the tastemaker can change their mind. Or, gen pop can change who they look up to as arbiters of taste.
There seems to be an element of familiarity too. What was considered 'cool' when one is a teenager becomes an anchor of sorts. Even if society moves on, there will be a cohort who holds on to the era which made the deepest impression on them.
I had taste before it was cool!
> It's all peer pressure, all social status.
You nailed it here. having 'taste' is a completely subjective concept driven mostly by the 'market-makers' of whatever industry. Your 'taste' is determined by the judgment of others.
No. Tastes are subjective; beauty is objective. This is what permits us to say whether someone has good or bad taste. If it were purely subjective, then it would be impossible to make these claims. They would be nothing more than expressions of power, whether by the majority or some authority.
Fads and fashions occur, sure, but they aren't always aligned with good taste. And you can have varieties of beauty (why can't two different styles both be beautiful in two different ways?). I also wouldn't exaggerate the divergence. Some of what you've written is cliche rather than history.
Unity, the true, the good, and the beautiful are but three different perspectives on being and a matter of objective reality. The discernment or subjective condition of the tastes of a person have to do with how one receives reality rather than reality itself. Reality is, after all, received according to the mode of the receiver.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", though I agree some forms of beauty are relatively universal
Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer.
The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including reducing dependence on ordering/positions of arguments.
On the other hand, apart from a few odd GUI disasters, it seems every piece of software I've used that has a UI I hate has had one or more designers behind it.
Is there even a "haute couture" school of design for interfaces other than GUIs? Are there designers who design for the experiences of people who are visually impaired short of totally blind? It seems to me that virtually no trained designers care about what actually makes computing experiences useful or pleasant for me, let alone beautiful. (And they often devote an inordinate amount of energy to things I'd say don't matter at all.)
Yea coherent systems are satisfying.
Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.
I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.
I haven't read the article, so just speaking generally...
(and not meaning to contradict you, just thinking aloud)
I think there's some overlap between "taste" and "thinking for yourself" — though they are not the same thing.
Lots of people don't want to think for themselves in every teeny aspect of life, so choosing from a menu of "good enough" options is reasonable. It doesn't mean they lack taste, just that they lack the energy/interest/etc in that moment for that activity.
Another aspect: plenty of people will know whether they like something when they see it, but they won't be able to describe what they want beforehand. So, they have taste (ability to choose a good one), but not an ability to enunciate it, or conjure it out of thin air.
Also, the "taste" terminology is often intertwined with "style", and I think that's unnecessarily limiting. An "engineer's taste" might help them decide between gadgets and gizmos, based on their merits, even if they're both ugly.
To your last example, I think modern Lodge cast iron frying pans are mediocre. Not because of ugliness/prettiness, but because the sharp ridge/seam on the handle from the casting process is not ground down. It makes it uncomfortable to hold. Also, the cooking surface is left rough. Compare it to an old Griswold — miles apart, according to my tastes. They're both handsome enough to look at, though.
The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings. Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even know they’ve lost taste for a significant amount of time.
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.
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
Absolutely not. Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to compensate you to use whatever you’ve made.
Art is rarely profitable for its own sake, but that doesn’t mean everything that is profitable is intrinsically devoid of taste.
Rephrased: Any artistic direction done in the interest of creating or increasing profits is overwhelmingly likely to be tasteless.
I don't think that's particularly controversial. Profitability doesn't imply tastelessness, but profit motive certainly does.
Kinda. But also not true.
When music production was tightly controlled, the competition among labels produced some really, really great songs. Timeless type stuff.
I dont hear anything of that quality anymore.
Tradeoffs. They exist.
I would argue that if you can't make a profit you have shown you are tasteless. If other people don't enjoy it enough to pay you, that says a lot about how out of step you are.
This would make a number of great artists of history "tasteless".
A would agree with that for a number of well known artists often called great.
If I were to bet on whether the critical consensus or some random person on HN had no taste, I would certainly bet on the latter. This post reeks of "Am I wrong? No! It is the artists, critics, collectors, and community who are wrong!"
There is no objective measure here. What i call good and bad is right for me and doesn't apply to anyone else-
wait - I though I was arguing for consensus here and everyone else was calling me wrong
Saying "out of step" rather than "out of touch" seems like a bit of a Freudian slip.
Making profit with art and making art for profit are tangentially related topics at best.
aren't you then equating taste with popularity ?
not sure if that's a popular opinion. In which case it would be tasteless.
There is no objective measure of taste. Popularity says that at least a lot of other people agree there is taste here.
A true artist is ahead of the tastes of the common rabble.
The vast majority of artists, many of the best, are common rabble.
Not artistically, they aren't.
Art isn't an expression of class hierarchy, so phrases like "common rabble" don't really mean anything.
The "only thing that matters are money" ideology at its peak.
Money isn't all that matters but it is one of the few objective signs we have.
Money is subjective. Like countries, it exists only in people's minds.
Its value comes from agreement by a large number of humans that it is valuable.
A stack of Benjamins would be nigh-valueless to people from 9th-century China.
Profit is surplus revenue, which means money that people paid you but which you didn't spend on improving your product, paying your staff better etc.
That's why making profit is sometimes seen as greedy, because it's money that could have been reinvested in the product.
Amazon in its early expansion phase never made a profit, because every cent was reinvested. And they didn't need to pay a cent of tax for that reason.
Profit is “how much your whole is more valuable than the sum of parts it consists of”. If your taste is what makes it valuable, then more profits reflect more taste.
> Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to compensate you to use whatever you’ve made.
In the spherical cow in vacuum market maybe. In practice there is rent seeking, profiteering, corruption, nepotism, etc ...
Late stage yes. But design has created the most valuable and profitable products and companies in the world.
Apple Ferrari Google Porsche Smaller companies like Yeti or Braun Etc etc
Once they use design to achieve dominance yes they do the rent seeking you are talking about.
Monopoly profits are the allure of innovation. Its the same reason those life-saving medicines get developed (patents).
Why is this a bad thing? Personally Id rather have an Apple monopoly than MSFT for instance. I really love using my Apple products. I never enjoyed using a single MSFT product.
A lot of open source developer don't get paid for their work, but their stuff is often used by everyone. There has to be a 'will to make it profitable'.
in order for anything to become truly profitable its uniqueness must be quantified and integrated into existing power structures, it must be expressly oriented towards fulfilling the needs/desires of the largest amount of people for the least amount of expenditure. Profitability IS intrinsically distasteful. Market forces, online ecosystems etc, quickly strip away any idiosyncratic features present in a viral trend, they aggressively select for sticking power, everything tends toward uniformity. This is closely linked with the process of reification.
Taste in this context is more referring to design rather than art though.
yes bedrotting watching reels all day is a valuable product. So is heroine. So eating junk food.
Great logic.
Maybe by the textbook definition, sure.
Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
Many people find advertising valuable.
It's tracking, micro targeting, retargeting, and trying to sell me a fridge that I literally just bought while I'm off reading about sailboats that's intrusive.
Advertise shoes, cleats, sails, and charters in the Bahamas while I'm doing that, not singles near me and bicycles because I posted in a Facebook group.
>Many people find advertising valuable.
Presumably the advertisers do.
Advertising and public relations has always been applied psychology. The contemporary interation was originally developed by Freuds nephew (Edward Bernays). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
I highly recommend The Century of the Self for a great documentary on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
Only for modern definitions of advertising, mind you, which are all about dark patterns and invasive marketing, rather than putting a descrption of your product out there that can be searched by interested parties looking to buy a product like yours.
There were times were advertising was useful and desirable, e.g. Small Ads pages.
There was also a time when ads were a single unintrusive scrolling line, curated by the website owner so as to be relevant to their audience. Those were fine.
And yet it’s the profit motive that has driven the shift to widespread usage of dark patterns and invasive marketing.
>Welcome to late-stage capitalism
That phrase has always seemed a bit wishful to me, like when Christians describe our era as the end times or when crypto people say "it's still early days".
I dont really get that phrase. I always view people who use it as intellectually lazy.
Yeah I think there is probably plenty more pain to come. I mean, we don't even have corporate controlled governments yet. Although that seems to be coming real soon.
How do consumers discover new products and services if not through advertising? A product on a shelf at a store is also a form of advertising proven by how much money is spent on packaging. Word of mouth is also one of the most effective forms of advertising.
> How do consumers discover new products
By looking them up when they need them
Sometimes sure, but more often than not they ‘realize’ they need x thing because recently they were told they need x thing. It’s a big oroborous.
TBF trying to sell me on anything with a commercial, print advertisement, video ad, cold call, or anything else is an exercise in frustration.
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do
Why's that? Profit, of course, is just the measure of how much trade is undelivered.
The old: I give you my corn to feed your chickens, and at some point in the future you will give me chickens in return once they are fed and grown. The amount of undelivered chickens are my profit. But eventually you will provide the chickens as promised, theoretically. Fair trade doesn't seem tasteless.
And if I forever hold on to that profit and never expect you to give me the chickens in the future as you originally promised, then I literally gave you the corn for free. How could it be tasteless to help someone out by giving them something for free?
Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all the insane laws that surround it.
>Having taste is one thing, having the standards to hold yourself to a certain level of quality, that's another thing altogether.
This is a mixup that the author of the article makes as well:
>Copying and pasting code without understanding it.
>Sending resumes and emails that aren’t proofread and edited.
>Asking others to review code without giving it a self review.
>Noticing a quality issue and failing to document or fix it.
These are not issues of taste.
Pretty good comment. It's a spectrum right? So if you went all in on profits you are likely all in on tastelessness. If you profit a small amount your probably only shedding a bit of your taste.
However I would wager the argument many people have is that they view their professional life as not utilizing their taste and that is reserved for decisions in their private lives (for those who still keep the two relatively distinct). For those who have truly merged professional and personal and gone all in profit -- original point probably stands. Thats pretty tasteless!
Almost all the artifacts considered beautiful from the last 500 years came from the use of excess profit invested into beauty and legacy.
Hang on, it depends on the intent.
Should an entity strive to be profitable? of course. How else will it be self sustaining?
The problem arises when entities maximize for profit with no non-financial values that underpin their decision making.
OK, Banksy.
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
This needs some justification. Profits are what you get when you can do something for less than you charge for it, and be competitive. To not be good enough to make profit you need to be able to force money out of people e.g. with taxes.
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.
Does it include the author of the blog post? Also your comment is also doing it...
Or is it only bad when "AI people" do it?
AI stuff is tasteless in a different sense: It's like food that has no flavor. It "lacks salt" in some non-literal sense.
And I think that is not all that surprising, because much of what it was trained on was corporate-speak, which has the same problem.
OTOH I read the success rate is only 50-50 at detecting it. AI text does leave some clues, like those infamous em dashes, but those can be patched with some simple edits. AI images are more obvious because many are intentionally overwrought.
It depends on what the AI is trying to do. If you write a novel and ask the AI to improve the prose it becomes very obvious if you've dealt with AI prose before.
I would argue the opposite, most of the AI slop I see is gaudy and overwrought, the result of too much flavour carelessly applied.
I agree. To me it feels like food with too many additives, like fast food.
airplane meme: that is only what you notice
The quoted part is really amazing. The author of the article just makes claims and clearly hasn't been exposed to any real art or music education. I suppose to some extent he means taste in programming, but anyone who is writing such an article does not have that either.
We can also talk about taste in articles, which seems to have degenerated to "any pro-AI article will be voted up and defended".
I'm not sure if this counts as a pro-AI article, but I agree. It's void of substance.
The most ironic part:
> When someone preaches about AI taste, ask them to show you their work from before AI. If they can’t demonstrate taste in their pre-AI work, they’re not qualified to lecture you about it now.
Talking about the lack of self-awareness...
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:
Good taste/bad taste is a subjective function of societal consensus, but having taste/not having taste is objective: you either think for yourself or you don't. Furthermore, the two are uncorrelated: one can have a very strong sense of taste but have it commonly regarded as "bad taste." Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be perceived as having "good taste."> Contrariwise, it's possible (but harder) to have no sense of taste and merely copy what most would regard as "good taste" and be perceived as having "good taste."
Not only possible, but exactly what AI does. :)
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.
>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... 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 don't think I've ever worked anywhere that'd accept a PR which introduced untested & undocumented features, in which the code doesn't even pass the company's internal linter.
Those feel like very low bars for your colleagues & clients to set.
> 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.
That's because I trust the code that I write to have quality, because I wrote it, which means I understand it. I may choose not to test something because I am certain that nothing can go wrong with it.
When your repository is thousands of lines of code written by an AI with tendencies to forget critical components, duplicate work, make bonkers editing errors that shuffles everything around to all the wrong places, and invent packages out of thin air, you need a system of accountability.
" I only get the most basic feedback: it should be in X style, pass Y linter, have N% coverage, have documentation"
Those are things that AIs can check by themselves.
What AIs are lacking is common sense.
They have no problem to inline everything they do which makes the codebase unmaintainable for humans
If you tell them to refactor, you get useless abstractions, like functions that get called in random places with no sense of structure.
Most manually written repositories are hobby projects where 0% test coverage is fine because it doesn’t matter.
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.
I agree the nomenclature could be tweaked. Perhaps tact, or class over taste. Taste is more personal and it's not really about that.
agree
As I get older, I'm more and more convinced that most people are just bad persons. I'm not joking.
Our societies incentivize a bunch of bad behaviors, especially when it comes to projecting the appearance of productivity. So I find that unsurprising.
I'm not Catholic, but I recognize the seven deadly sins as valid moral precepts by any measure. Capitalism advocates for all of them excepting sloth. Get to work.
I think especially in the US, we've really normalized and to a degree even celebrate and rewarded being a tactless jerk who cuts corners or worse as long as they get what they want (usually money).
Doing hard work for better(quality, moral etc) results is very out of fashion.
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.
Yes. The people who had low standards in the first place find it transformative.
If you have high standards, its regurgitating info in an ill disciplined fashion. Because its input isn't really of the highest standard upon which the model is trained on.
It regurgitates info in a way that is very specific to what and how you requested it. If you ask it a question already having an estimate of how accurate its answers will be, you can get a lot of value from it.
Nope, Ive tested its understanding on things like corporate finance which I know very deeply.
It touches surface level stuff - which makes sense, most stuff on the internet is surface level. Good enough to pass an exam (since exams are essentially memorisation and regurigation of that nowadays) but not enough depth of understanding to be able to apply it in a wide range of contexts.
The application is where all the value is in the real world.
Surface level is where you can find the most day to day value. Just today I've used it to get advice about putting up a treehouse, rough price ranges and differences between fridges, common fridge widths, adding second accounts to microG, command flags to identify slow tests, poe support for my wifi router, differences in laser measurement devices, french translation, medication storage, different types of olive, and drafting 3 emails in another language. All of this would have taken me way longer without these tools, I'm confident it gave good results because I know that the information exists and is common.
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.
>> Good English used to be one.
There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those parameters :-) .
Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often, that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.
I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing (financially) is good marketing.
<< I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good "bullshit detector" are now more important than ever.
Yes. Oddly, for once, English majors may actually benefit, because they may be better prepared than most to prepare prompts for the jobs of tomorrow ( mild sarcasm, coffee didn't kick in yet ).
You laugh, but I'm seen as a local/regional expert at prompt engineering in my field because of my background in technical and creative writing learned as an English major. People pay me to help them understand these tools and how to use them in their work. All I'm doing with them is logic and communication.
I have zero idea how the tools work, I'm just really good at communicating in a clear and concise manner when I need to.
Honest go god, if I laugh in this instance, it is because a good thing is happening for relatively dumb reasons ( it is the same thing with documentation -- all of a sudden, good documentation is required so that AI can go through it ).
I remain convinced that it is those who studied/have a passion for the humanities and liberal arts that will be leading the charge of future product innovation.
With all due respect with pure technologists, they just dont understand people, what they need, and how to envision/communicate the benefits.
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.
Lol youre giving too much credit to certain people.
People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20 years...
What certain people do you mean?
To me it's undeniable that the web has become more centralised, more homogenised, and certain agents find that very convenient.
even wiki(pedia|data) is very convenient for large scale training, and most of their sources are from the 'open' web.
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.
I think you should elaborate, otherwise the same feedback could be provided for your comment.
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.
did you not adapt to google search by just typing keywords you know will get results instead of typing full sentences about what you're searching for?
Fair point, but I did not attempt to integrate google search into my processes or workflow ( shows what I know about future predictions ), because while it was useful and did provide access to information, it was obviously limited in a sense that it could only take a mule like me to the water.
I don't want to delve into specifics, because it is a public forum. But the difference between learning google syntax and llm handling ( which I suppose would include prompt engineering ) should not be understated.
Agree, I think OP doesn’t remember learning to ride a bicycle either.
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
Faster is the enemy of taste
Yeah.
I mean another way to think about it is - eating artificially produced food.
What happens when you consume it? Your taste for good stuff is eroded away - somehow, the artificial crap is acceptable. Most notably because of its lower price.
The same phenonomon with food, will prevail with information.
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.
Yeah it’s a lot of projection.
I read it again but I can't figure out what you mean here.
One thing to lack taste, but awareness? woof.
Just like with Youtubers, people will stop these practices when people stop clicking on them.
It’s very easy for us to tell people to just not do that stuff, but I can tell you from my podcast production days that these annoying trends are often the difference between a 20% rise and a 20% drop in audience. No different than a clever book title turning heads.
To be clear, I find most of these trends incredibly obnoxious and I hated indulging them.
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".
Is it subjective to say that Apple had more taste in producing the Mac OS than Microsoft when they produced Windows XP?
Its not as subjective.
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.