Is taste something that cannot be replaced by AI?

“I don’t think I can teach anyone taste,” said New York brand designer Jamie Gannon.

Gannon, 24, runs an online course called “Learn how to control AI like a creative director” for designers and marketers at big tech companies like Google, Meta, and Coinbase. Its purpose is to teach engineers how to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their designs. Of course, in a classy way.

However, it is of no use to students who are not motivated to work outside of class.

“If you watch all the Wes Anderson movies and spend an hour a day on Pinterest and hone your style, you’ll have better taste in a year,” Gannon said.

Like “sarcasm” and “funnyness,” “taste” is highly context-dependent. Is it discernment? Sensitivity? Cultivation? Is it innate or learned? Is it a marker of distinction or a marker of class?

Whatever it is, except in certain rarefied worlds, personal tastes in food, art, design, interior design, etc. are usually not a prerequisite for professional success. Unless you listen to OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

“Taste is the new core skill,” Brockman wrote on social platform X last month.

Such a declaration may seem strange to the big kahuna of the tech industry, known for its numbers over qualifications.

But in recent months, the rise of advanced AI tools that can instruct people to code better and faster than humans in plain language has forced many in the tech industry to reflect on their outdated outlook.

If computers can do anyone’s programming work, or if they can turn people who can type into programmers, how can people make themselves indispensable?

Maybe there is something that cannot be quantified.

“When it’s so easy to make any idea a reality, it’s tempting to make all ideas a reality, and most of them shouldn’t even be produced,” says host and developer Sean Wang. latent spacea newsletter and podcast popular among a growing class of programmers who rely on AI tools for much of their work.

Wang, who goes by the name Swyx (which rhymes with candy bar), said if too much is produced, the result will be “sloppy.”

It’s an eerily common geyser of AI-made media that has flooded our feeds. It’s plentiful, aesthetically unpleasant, and at the bottom of the shelf. For Wang and others, the antidote to sulo is taste. Here it refers to the human judgment that guides the machine and chooses among its many outputs.

Wang cited recent examples of what is considered good taste in culture at large. KPop Demon Hunters has become an animated sensation on Netflix. And last year, AI startup Anthropic opened a pop-up called Zero Slop Zone in New York.

It is generally accepted that Steve Jobs, a great figure in the technology industry, had a highly developed sense. He wore custom Issey Miyake turtlenecks as personal clothing and considered the elegant designs of Apple products to be a form of cultural uplift for the masses.

But the industry public hasn’t broken away from the stereotypes of gray hoodies, bloodless co-working spaces, and geeky hobbies. Could it be taught differently?

Of course, learning to taste is not easy. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorized that taste is a function of an individual’s overall “habitus,” the way a person’s social background shapes their perceptions of and reactions to the world.

Of course, in an industry where contrarianism is considered a virtue, not everyone will agree that this trend of taste is good taste.

In a widely shared essay titled, contrary to tasteinvestor and author Will Manidis called the debate over taste a “radical demotion” of “human agency” that reduces us to mere consumers rather than creators.

“It places humans at the end of the chain of creation, valuing what has already been produced,” Manidis wrote.

Emily Segal, co-founder of brand consultancy Nemesis, whose clients include Louis Vuitton, Nike and Cash App, said the tech industry’s attempts to speed up Hisense are missing an important quality: individual uniqueness.

“Taste is by definition relational and relative, so a cookie-cutter taste is by definition a bad taste,” Segal said. “You can’t just copy the idea of ​​good taste in the context and hold it as good taste.”

Whether sense is the basis of a new approach to technology or just a buzzword, at least one industry luminary believes the debate itself is a healthy sign.

“Any time engineers talk about something that’s hard to measure, that’s subjective, that has to do with human empathy and emotion, that’s a step in the right direction,” said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.

Mr. Spiegel has the highest aesthetic sense among the heads of high-tech companies and has even appeared on the cover of an Italian men’s fashion magazine. Luomo VogueAnd he is on the board of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where he took classes as a high school student.

Spiegel said he believes taste in product design is about anticipating what people want. Can AI do that? perhaps. But for the time being, Spiegel said, the debate about taste is forced to ask deeper questions about what makes traditional seeds essential to the tech world.

“I love that this moment is inspiring people to spend more time thinking about what truly makes us human,” he said. “If it wasn’t intelligence, it might keep us all focused on more important things. That would be a good thing.”

As for what those are, well, it might be a matter of taste. new york times