Kate Wagner

I would say my personal taste is like a seven, but I know it should be higher.

So maybe it's like a nine.

I also think that taste is in some way a collective practice.

Like, it's something that we make not just by ourselves, but as a sort of collective body of knowledge, the things that we read, the things that we watch, the people we listen to on podcasts, and also our friends, like...

Graphic design is not really my area because I'm an architecture critic, but I feel like I have pretty good taste in graphic design because I know all these people and they talk about their work.

And so there's a kind of self-knowledge, but also a collective knowledge that I think is really important for discussing taste.

I kind of feel also that

Something that I think is really important to talk about here is the fact that AI has cannibalized all of the free labor of being on the Internet.

And so when we talk about like the taste that AI make, it's like I always think about something like mood board culture from like Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram from like the early 2010s.

where a bunch of people did a ton of free labor doing things like collecting images that fit a certain mold, like Y2K aesthetic, for example, or cottagecore, any of these other things.

These were, in their purest forms in the early 2010s, massive archival undertakings by ordinary people trying to understand the world at large.

All of that effort has now just been basically used as a data set for AI to basically regurgitate something like that that took all that creative effort in what was best about social media despite all of the horrible things that it's done.

And so for me, it's like, yeah, social media was, I think, a mistake, especially in terms of how much of my life I've wasted on it and all of the bad tweets that I've made and all of the enemies and all of like, it was worth nothing now that it's like the hell site.

But at the same time, there were things that were beautiful about it and all of those things have been subsumed.

So for me, it's like really sad.

It's like walking around the ruins of Athens, you know?

God.

Oh, I mean, I find the whole thing incredibly offensive because like everything I learned about architecture, I learned at the community college library when I was in high school.

And it was actually a lot of work to like be on the skyscraper city forums, 40 pages deep in the brutalism thread, like developing an encyclopedic knowledge of like the worst buildings ever built.

And it's like that work, no one has to do it anymore.