You Had No Taste Before AI
matthewsanabria.dev
matthewsanabria.dev
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Granted, I does hold up better than most, but I don't think it's an example of some immutable, objective principles of fashion.
Like you statement could not be more absurdly wrong to a laughable degree.
When you develop a good eye for clothing your sense of taste will be detached from fashion trends. Whether you like oversize pieces or not, you can tell whether the fit is good because fit is a matter of crafstmanship. You can tell from the color scheme what was the artistic attempt and whether the attempt was reached. You can tell the quality of the fabrics. You can tell the historical references a piece is inspired by and whether those references are coherent.
You develop a taste for cocktails and wines and you can try a cocktail that you don't personally prefer, say a Negroni. But you can tell whether the acidity and sweetness levels go well with the ingredients of choice, whether the aromatics are high quality, whether the glass accompanies the drink and if the drink was served at the correct temperature.
If you know about cuisine and someone executes a dish based on a specific style, you can immediately tell of the chef knew about the underlying theory behind those styles and how well they were executed. And they decided to purposefully make a break from a style, you can tell if that made for an impactful quality result or if they should have stuck to the original.
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...
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.
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.
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.)
Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.
But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness"
So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.
But I've been visually impaired my entire life, I'm colorblind, my colorblindness is progressive, and I'm going blind (timeline unknown). So my worries that HCI might not be "for me" come from a few places:
1. (This is the element you've perhaps picked up on.) Vision is generally the least compelling aesthetic dimension to me. I love music and poetry, but visual art virtually never moves me. Visual experiences generally lack spiritual depth for me, to the point that I sometimes find the way some people talk about visual art ridiculous or irritating. This is what I mean about not fitting in with people who are passionate about visual design.
2. Because of my vision, a lot of common assumptions about user interface design, especially about what is easy, natural, difficult, or awkward probably don't apply to me on a physical level. For instance:
- I often have to use full screen magnification, which violates the assumption that an entire application is visible to me at once
- gaze detection data can't even be collected for people with eyes like mine because our acuity problems are *worse* in the central visual field to the point that in advanced cases people have to read text exclusively using their peripheral vision
- sometimes it seems I have visual processing difficulties to the point of being unable to tell what a picture is even an image of, like if there are any objects in the image and what they are
- visually recognizing things takes me a lot of time and effort relative to other people, even when I can reliably do it
- although I am significantly and untreatably visually impaired, I do not yet use a screen reader in any capacity and I don't know Braille at all
> It's literally one of the trendiest things in design
Ask a person with low vision about how the rollout of "accessible buses" in Chicago affected their transit experience. I'll give you a hint: it made things worse and more difficult. My sister, who is blind, complains about it all the time. When a friend of hers, who is also blind, called in to say that she couldn't read the stops on the displays in the new "accessible buses", the response (after months of silence) was "we asked Chicago Lighthouse how to design the display, and they said standards called for a bold font and contrasting colors, so we're compliant". In fact the display has a much smaller font than the old LED displays. The colors are bright yellow and bright blue, which are "contrasting colors" but have very little luminance contrast, and they're overall harder to distinguish despite the bold font. Why were these colors actually chosen? It has nothing to do with contrast or accessibility— it's because they're the brand colors of the Chicago Transit Authority. And when actual blind people call them to tell them this doesn't in fact work for them, their answer is that they don't give a shit and that they're not interested in changing anything. (Changes would be physically trivial; the new displays are big-ass LCD TVs.)
This is the norm for accessibility initiatives in the real world, because disabled people are rarely directly involved in the design of anything.
If you've lived your whole life in a world in which accessibility concerns are purely theoretical and/or external to you, I suppose it's easy to have faith in "trends". But nobody who has actually navigated the world with disabilities does. Frankly, the only circumstances in which I'd be confident that an HCI class would not be primarily grounded in the primacy of the visual and the assumption of normal vision is (a) if I've reviewed the curriculum of a specific course and the curriculum indicates otherwise or (b) the course is taught by a blind person. Even so, I'm on the fence— maybe I still want to take such a course.
I'm in the early stages of planning to go back to school here, thinking out loud about whether HCI is a corner of computer science worth visiting for me and sharing that question as part of a perspective on "design" and how I relate to it. I don't need help remembering that accessibility research exists, thank you so very much.
It could also be that their work is dictated, so they don't get to explore and research.
It could also be that they are too removed from the users to understand them.
(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.
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.
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.
Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
By looking them up when they need them
Chances are, you found out at least some of those due to advertisers. No man is an island.
Word of mouth: fine
Product on a shelf: fine unless you made a deal with the manufacturer/distributor to put it prominently rather than believing it deserves to be there
Taking money to give an endorsement: Bad. That makes you a liar.
It's the dishonesty at the heart of almost all advertising that makes it bad (well that and the often accompanying implicit push for people to frivolously consume).
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.
Presumably the advertisers do.
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.
Reasonable profit is necessary. Something needs to put food on the table, both for your own family and that of your workers.
What you don't need is a 3 million dollar jet on the table at the expense of both your workers and your customers.
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
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 don't think that's particularly controversial. Profitability doesn't imply tastelessness, but profit motive certainly does.
wait - I though I was arguing for consensus here and everyone else was calling me wrong
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.
And to be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing. It's necessary to keep civilization working.
The violence, once enacted, is an objective fact.
The threat of violence is still there only due to the collective subjective agreement that countries exist.
The IRS would have no functional power if Washington, D.C. and other major US cities were destroyed in a nuclear exchange.
I could imagine many citizens still choosing to pay taxes of some sort and/or respect the value of physical dollars in such a scenario, but it would likely not be due to fear of the federal government. Possibly fear of local police, though.
if I inherit $44 million dollars because I happened to fall out of the right vagina the only thing it symbolizes is that I got lucky -- I could be a fat, degenerate bastard underserving of anything.
ditto for lottery winners.
If all I have is a yardstick, and I'm trying to measure weight, then I would probably be much better served using a qualitative method than by trying to use the yardstick.
not sure if that's a popular opinion. In which case it would be tasteless.
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.
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.
Great logic.
In the spherical cow in vacuum market maybe. In practice there is rent seeking, profiteering, corruption, nepotism, etc ...
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.
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.
remember folks 20-40% of social media is bots -- this is just a low-hanging fruit
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Speak for yourself, not everyone works for the paycheck.
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.
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.
We can also talk about taste in articles, which seems to have degenerated to "any pro-AI article will be voted up and defended".
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...
Or is it only bad when "AI people" do it?
do these people detect all AI? Of course not, they detect crap.
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?
Not only possible, but exactly what AI does. :)
1. Attention is finite. You can't be tasteful in everything you do. If I dedicate my attention to making tasteful home design, I just don't have the attention to take tasteful photos, and it makes sense that instead I'll just look at photos that someone else prepared. In this scenario, I'm very tasteful in home design, I'm completely tasteless in photography. And that's great. Because the alternative is to be mediocre in everything.
2. It just makes sense that for any given problem, the society would dedicate a small group of individuals to find a tasteful solution, and then apply said solution across the whole population. Most tasteful people are far deep into the territory of diminishing returns, and the attitude of everyone being tasteful simply won't work at the scale of entire society. This means that it's an expectation that most people would be tasteless in most situations, and just follow tasteful people's suggestions - after all, are you going to argue against your doctor, or are you going to just take the prescribed pills, even if theoretically you could improve your treatment by 2%?
> 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."
That's exactly the most common scenario. Blindly following latest trends will usually result in others perceiving you positively.
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.
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.
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 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.
But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer.
No. I think you're wrong.
'Vibe coding' (a phrase I hate) introduced me to so many different software packages that I didn't even knew existed. Now, with no LLM subscription, I still use many of the software packages that I discovered via LLMs in my own work.
Like any other media, whether or not you use it as a springboard for learning is up to you. Literally every other store of knowledge had critics like you with that same exact opinion (boob-tube, brain-drain, couch-potatos, book-worms) -- and every single one of those forms of media ended up tremendously useful for us.
When you watch YouTube you don't have to go watch the most popular asinine shorts; you could use it to learn a language or perhaps some history or a math lesson.
Is it bad because a lazy person can be tempted into skipping the work and making the LLM do it? That's because a lazy person is involved -- not because the technology 'is a mind virus'.
P.S. 'mind virus' is the stupidest nu-speak crap term I have heard in years. In fact the whole "I don't like the thing so i'm going to give it a scary name" concept has become so tired in recent years that I have a hard time keeping up with the new dictionary -- is this what getting old is like in every era or is this special?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...
Don't go blaming Dawkins, no one said that shit until recently. As with much crap nu-speak it looks like Musk was the one that set it off. Figures.
Doing hard work for better(quality, moral etc) results is very out of fashion.
If only tasteful minority will complain - they will soon shrink into tasteful micro-minority. Complaining is still a useful feedback (half the time)
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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 ).
With all due respect with pure technologists, they just dont understand people, what they need, and how to envision/communicate the benefits.
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.
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.
- 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.
People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20 years...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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…
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".
Its not as subjective.
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.
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
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.
You could say that propaganda authors had more taste back in my day.
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.