You Had No Taste Before AI
48 comments
·September 18, 2025btbuildem
Having taste is one thing, having the standards to hold yourself to a certain level of quality, that's another thing altogether.
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.
mattgreenrocks
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
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.
banannaise
Rephrased: Any artistic direction done in the interest of creating or increasing profits is overwhelmingly likely to be tasteless.
I don't think that's particularly controversial. Profitability doesn't imply tastelessness, but profit motive certainly does.
StilesCrisis
Maybe by the textbook definition, sure.
Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
tpoacher
Only for modern definitions of advertising, mind you, which are all about dark patterns and invasive marketing, rather than putting a descrption of your product out there that can be searched by interested parties looking to buy a product like yours.
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.
literalAardvark
Many people find advertising valuable.
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.
phyzix5761
How do consumers discover new products and services if not through advertising? A product on a shelf at a store is also a form of advertising proven by how much money is spent on packaging. Word of mouth is also one of the most effective forms of advertising.
9rx
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do
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?
rhetocj23
Hang on, it depends on the intent.
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.
philipallstar
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
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.
CGMthrowaway
As someone who works with a lot of creatives, I've noticed people tend to get really defensive and self-righteous anytime "taste" comes up, on both sides - the haute designer-types vs. the scrappy I-can-do-it types. So I won't be surprised if this post is controversial. But it's insightful.
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.
ivape
The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings. Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even know they’ve lost taste for a significant amount of time.
literalAardvark
Case in point: unusable grey on grey UI designed by colourblind designers.
Maybe let someone who can see colours pick something usable? You don't have to drag everyone to your level in the name of accessibility.
NackerHughes
“The loudest voices preaching about taste and AI are often the ones who never demonstrated taste before AI.”
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.
oftenwrong
[delayed]
philipp-gayret
I very often hear from developers at clients I work with that code they (not me) generate with AI is not of enough "quality".
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.
k__
" I only get the most basic feedback: it should be in X style, pass Y linter, have N% coverage, have documentation"
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.
StilesCrisis
Most manually written repositories are hobby projects where 0% test coverage is fine because it doesn’t matter.
kraftman
I think this really underpins the difference between the people that say AI is useless and those that say it's enhanced many aspects of their day to day lives.
rhetocj23
Yes. The people who had low standards in the first place find it transformative.
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.
philipwhiuk
Just because you like something very few people like, doesn't mean you have better/more taste than them.
fluxusars
Taste is a very subjective thing, but I think in a lot of the things described in the article there is a clear better or worse. I would describe that as craftsmanship or attention to detail, more of a craft than an art.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
While I am not sure I actually agree with the author, I think he touched on something interesting. LLM is probably the first tool, where I consciously adapted to using it. For better or worse, it can change you and you get to pick direction of that change.
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.
kraftman
did you not adapt to google search by just typing keywords you know will get results instead of typing full sentences about what you're searching for?
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Fair point, but I did not attempt to integrate google search into my processes or workflow ( shows what I know about future predictions ), because while it was useful and did provide access to information, it was obviously limited in a sense that it could only take a mule like me to the water.
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.
StilesCrisis
Agree, I think OP doesn’t remember learning to ride a bicycle either.
MontyCarloHall
Most people equate "having taste" to "having good taste," but this article nicely illustrates that this is a false equivalence. "Having taste" simply means valuing forming one's opinions autonomously. As the author writes:
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?
jsharpe
> 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."
Not only possible, but exactly what AI does. :)
meindnoch
As I get older, I'm more and more convinced that most people are just bad persons. I'm not joking.
I had taste before AI and I have taste now. I am not convinced by arguments like "I have noticed that people who [belief that applies to the majority of the population being discussed] also do [negative thing that is also incredibly common]" because I have taste.