Is taste the one thing AI can’t replace?
The debate is forcing deeper questions about what makes the legacy species of the tech industry indispensable
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“I DON’T think I could teach someone to have taste,” said Jamey Gannon, a brand designer in New York.
Gannon, 24, runs an online course, called “Learn to control AI like a creative director”, for designers and marketers from Big Tech firms such as Google, Meta and Coinbase. The idea is to teach tech guys to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their designs – tastefully, of course.
But it will not help students who are not willing to put in the work outside class.
“If you watch every Wes Anderson movie, spend an hour a day on Pinterest and work on your personal style, in a year you will come out with better taste,” Gannon said.
“Taste”, like “irony” or “fun”, depends largely on context. Is it discernment? Sensibility? Cultivation? Is it inborn or learnt? A marker of distinction or a marker of class?
Whatever it is, personal taste about things such as food, art, design and interiors – outside certain rarefied worlds – is not usually a prerequisite for professional success. Unless you listen to Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI.
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“Taste is a new core skill,” Brockman wrote on the social platform X last month.
For a big kahuna in the tech industry, which is known more for quantifying than qualifying, such a proclamation might seem strange.
Yet, in recent months, the rise of sophisticated AI tools that can be told in plain language to code better and faster than humans has forced many in the tech world to contemplate the prospect of their own obsolescence.
If a computer can do anyone’s programming job – or turn anyone who can type into a programmer – how can a person make themself indispensable?
Maybe with something impossible to quantify.
“When you can easily turn any idea into reality, it is tempting to turn every idea into reality – and most things should not be produced,” said Shawn Wang, a developer who hosts Latent Space, a newsletter and podcast popular among the growing class of coders who rely on AI tools for much of their work.
When too much is produced, said Wang, who writes under the name Swyx (it rhymes with the candy bar), the result is “slop”.
That is, the geyser of uncannily generic AI-made media that has flooded our feeds. It is plentiful, aesthetically off-putting and bottom shelf. For Wang and others, the antidote to slop is taste – which here means the judgment of a human guiding the machine and choosing between its many outputs.
Wang cited some recent examples of what he considered good taste in the culture at large: a Ferrari designed by Jony Ive, the former Apple creative lead; KPop Demon Hunters, the animated Netflix sensation; and Anthropic, the AI startup that last year opened a pop-up in New York that it called a “Zero Slop Zone”.
It is generally accepted that the tech industry’s greatest figure, Steve Jobs, had highly developed taste. He wore a custom Issey Miyake turtleneck as his personal uniform, and he considered the elegant design of his Apple products to be a form of cultural elevation for the masses.
But the industry’s rank and file have not escaped the stereotype of grey hoodies, bloodless co-working spaces and nerdy hobbies. Can they be taught otherwise?
Taste, of course, is no small thing to learn: It is a function, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorised, of one’s entire “habitus”, the way a person’s social context shapes their perception of and reaction to the world.
Of course, in an industry where contrarianism is considered a virtue, not everyone agrees that the taste trend is, well, tasteful.
In a widely shared essay titled Against Taste, investor-writer Will Manidis called the discussion around taste a “fundamental demotion” of “human agency” that reduced us to mere consumers rather than creators.
“It places man at the end of the chain of creation, evaluating what has already been generated,” Manidis wrote.
Emily Segal, a co-founder of the brand consultancy Nemesis – her clients include Louis Vuitton, Nike and Cash App – said that the tech world’s attempts to speed run good taste missed out on a crucial quality: personal idiosyncrasy.
“Cookie-cutter taste is by definition bad taste, because taste is by definition relational and relative,” Segal said. “You can’t just clone some situational idea of good taste and hold it up as good taste.”
Whether taste is the basis of a new approach to technology or merely a buzzword, at least one eminence of the industry thinks the discussion is a healthy sign in and of itself.
“Any time that technologists are talking about things that are hard to measure and subjective, and have to do with human empathy and feelings, it’s a step in the right direction,” said Evan Spiegel, the chief executive officer of Snap.
Spiegel, among the most aesthetically minded of the tech bosses, once appeared on the cover of Italian men’s fashion magazine L’Uomo Vogue, and he sits on the board of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where he took classes as a high schooler.
Spiegel said he believed that taste – in product design, anyway – was about anticipating what people wanted. Can AI do that? Maybe. But for the time being, Spiegel said, the taste debate is forcing deeper questions about what makes the legacy species of the tech industry indispensable.
“I love that this moment is causing people to spend more time thinking about what really makes us human,” he said. “If it’s not intelligence, it might focus us all on things that are far more important. And that would be a good thing.”
As for what those things are, well, it may be a matter of taste. NYTIMES
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