Good Taste Can't Be Taught, Bought or Learned, Sorry AI | Hacker News Reader

Good Taste Can't Be Taught, Bought or Learned, Sorry AI

emilyoberg.substack.com

23 pointscdrnsf9 comments

> AI will never understand why you can’t wear Nike socks with adidas shoes.

This sounds like something I will never understand either.

Sometimes I wonder if good taste is actually a real thing, or is instead a manufactured perception created by marketing teams...

Neither will I, but it looks like a super easy rule to add to an expert system or the system prompt. Anyway, don't most LLM know that you shouldnotbreak pasta?

A lot more people have taste than have previously been able to materialize it.

With AI, I created printable artifacts for a booth of a nonprofit I advise. We don't have a "creative" on the team but I'm fluent with all of Claude's tools and I feel I have good taste. I am not what you'd typically call a "creative" though - because I lacked certain skills that are less important now.

In about 30 minutes, I had a PDF I could upload to FedEx Kinkos to print. It looked very professional. Partly because it was based off the website that Claude also helped me design.

In the same way that AI enables me to bypass creatives, it lets creatives by bypass someone like me.

If most people’s “latent” taste was as good as they thought it was, we wouldn’t have so much “AI slop” - AI generations that are so-labeled precisely because the act of publishing them demonstrates significantly below-average taste.

IME, most users of the term “AI slop” use it for all (identified) uses of AI because they believe that use of AI is itself inherently an indication of poor taste and low effort that invalidates the work independently of what quality the work would have viewed independently of the mode of creation.

There are definitely people who accept AI use generally who try to make “AI slop” a distinction within the universe of AI creation rather than a label for the entire universe of AI creation, but that seems to be a minority use of the term.

I'm not sure "most" people have taste (assuming taste isn't subjective).

I don't think AI slop is indicative of taste. A lot of work doesn't care about taste at all. And AI slop is problematic in that it churns out an awful lot of output that people don't really care to review.

> I'm not sure "most" people have taste (assuming taste isn't subjective).

Taste is literally the thing which the concept of subjectivity exists to explain!

I’d frame taste as a combination of both. People mindfully interacting with a domain will develop nuanced aesthetic preference within it, and while preference is subjective, there’s still plenty that can be agreed upon or respected. Much like morality and relativism.

Obliviousness and uncaring will have similar failure modes, all the more so if both lead to rubber-stamping AI outputs to vague prompts.

Not that I wouldn't find AI output kitsch often, but it's been really quite eye opening to see the outright hordes of shameless narcissists crawl out of the woodworks, and really abuse the snot out of the fact that the models are not people, and that therefore, their otherwise hilariously obnoxious snobbery is now suddenly socially acceptable, if not even encouraged.

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