Chapter 1: What does having 'good taste' really mean?
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On a scale of one to 10, how good is each of your aesthetic tastes?
I would say my personal taste is like a seven, but I know it should be higher. So maybe it's like a nine.
Okay, I'll give you a 9.5. I'm gonna raise you on that one. I like that. Okay, what about you, Kyle?
You can't say 10. It would be tasteless to say 10. And I think you have taste in different areas, right? Like my fashion taste, I would not say is that amazing. My contemporary art taste, I would give myself an 8.5 at least.
Who was the first tastemaker in your life? For me, it was my Aunt Cassandra. She always looked so fly whenever I saw her. She had the Reebok ladies sneaker in every color. And she also had the most spectacular condo in Atlanta. High ceilings, lots of light, art from around the world. Maya Cassandra is still my girl to this day.
And over time, I discovered Elsa Clench on CNN, blogs, and my friends in high school and college. They all influenced my taste. But I want you to meet the new tastemakers of our time. AI chatbots? At least they want to be. Taste is the new Silicon Valley buzzword.
From venture capitalists to AI opportunity peddlers, these guys seem to think that good taste will be the one thing that will set you apart from everyone in your life and the one thing that will get you to buy their product. But what is taste really? And can an AI bot replicate it?
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Chapter 2: Who are the new tastemakers in our society?
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 love that. Not just self-knowledge, but collective knowledge. I mean, I think this is the case for a lot of people. Our taste is developed through knowing other people and seeing the world through their eyes, hearing music through their ears. You kind of have to be in the world a bit. Exactly. Absolutely.
To that thought, if these AI companies are trying to monetize taste, that brings me to a philosophical question. Like, do you think there's a quality to having taste that is uniquely human that AI can't replicate? Such as, at least in my mind, kind of like being in the world and like mixing with people?
I think so. I mean, I think as Kate was saying, you can't really have taste without other people and without a community of people experiencing things with you. And you can't have taste without existing. You can't have taste if you have no self that the taste is built upon, you know? Damn. And to me, AI has no sense of self. It has no sense of beauty. It literally has no feeling.
It's just a set of average predictive equations that tell you which word is likely to go after the last word. And so in that sense, I don't think AI can have taste at all. And I think that the AI bros are trying to be like, oh, but humans are going to bring the taste. I, the entrepreneur, will lend my taste to the robot. but I don't really trust their tastes either.
Like one of the people that's probably influenced my taste a lot, I'm rolling my eyes because the answer is corny. It's my husband. We spent a lot of time together, you know? So it's like, it'd be kind of weird if we weren't like having a mind meld in this way. I think back to like when we were first dating and we watched this movie called Pina by Wim Wenders.
It's a documentary about the late choreographer Pina Bausch. And he was so excited about it. It was like, I have a memory of watching the film and loving the film, but also a memory of feeling like I was taking a trip through this other person's mind. But it's linked to all of these other experiences. It's linked to like the modern dance class I took in my high school.
It's linked to like the years of tap jazz and ballet that I took as a child. Like all of these things kind of come together just around this one recommendation. And that to me seems kind of like that's one of the big human things that's missing is like, like AIs don't have human experiences, they can't have memories.
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Chapter 3: Can AI truly replicate human taste?
Whereas now AI can also not just recommend something but literally make what you are demanding at a moment's notice.
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?
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It's like a substitution of slop for maybe more human artistry.
Stay right there. We definitely know that taste doesn't necessarily correspond with how much money you have. It's really kind of a matter of allowing yourself to be open and also coming at things with a critical eye and with a lot of thought. And anybody can do that. And also, too, you could be in a higher socioeconomic class and not have any taste.
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