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You Had No Taste Before AI
- chiffre01 1y agoSeems like most of the 'tasteless' habits in the article are also just laziness.
- philipwhiuk 1y agoJust because you like something very few people like, doesn't mean you have better/more taste than them.
- fluxusars 1y agoTaste 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.
- kraftman 1y agoI 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 1y agoYes. 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.
- kraftman 1y agoIt regurgitates info in a way that is very specific to what and how you requested it. If you ask it a question already having an estimate of how accurate its answers will be, you can get a lot of value from it.
- rhetocj23 1y agoNope, Ive tested its understanding on things like corporate finance which I know very deeply. It touches surface level stuff - which makes sense, most stuff on the internet is surface level. Good enough to pass an exam (since exams are essentially memorisation and regurigation of that nowadays) but not enough depth of understanding to be able to apply it in a wide range of contexts. The application is where all the value is in the real world.
- kraftman 1y agoSurface level is where you can find the most day to day value. Just today I've used it to get advice about putting up a treehouse, rough price ranges and differences between fridges, common fridge widths, adding second accounts to microG, command flags to identify slow tests, poe support for my wifi router, differences in laser measurement devices, french translation, medication storage, different types of olive, and drafting 3 emails in another language. All of this would have taken me way longer without these tools, I'm confident it gave good results because I know that the information exists and is common.
- btbuildem 1y agoHaving 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 1y ago> 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.
- StilesCrisis 1y agoMaybe 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.
- phyzix5761 1y agoHow 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.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoI'm not a fan of this clickbaity trend where the author pretends everyone else is as insufferably boring as they are in order to have an argument.
- thenanyu 1y agoYeah it’s a lot of projection.
- Forgeties79 1y agoJust like with Youtubers, people will stop these practices when people stop clicking on them. It’s very easy for us to tell people to just not do that stuff, but I can tell you from my podcast production days that these annoying trends are often the difference between a 20% rise and a 20% drop in audience. No different than a clever book title turning heads. To be clear, I find most of these trends incredibly obnoxious and I hated indulging them.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoI read it again but I can't figure out what you mean here.
- freejazz 1y agoOne thing to lack taste, but awareness? woof.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NackerHughes 1y ago“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.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoAI stuff is tasteless in a different sense: It's like food that has no flavor. It "lacks salt" in some non-literal sense. And I think that is not all that surprising, because much of what it was trained on was corporate-speak, which has the same problem.
- Fricken 1y agoI would argue the opposite, most of the AI slop I see is gaudy and overwrought, the result of too much flavour carelessly applied.
- paulpauper 1y agoairplane meme: that is only what you notice
- edu 1y agoI agree. To me it feels like food with too many additives, like fast food.
- paulpauper 1y agoOTOH I read the success rate is only 50-50 at detecting it. AI text does leave some clues, like those infamous em dashes, but those can be patched with some simple edits. AI images are more obvious because many are intentionally overwrought.
- Aerroon 1y agoIt depends on what the AI is trying to do. If you write a novel and ask the AI to improve the prose it becomes very obvious if you've dealt with AI prose before.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoWhile 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 1y agodid 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 1y agoFair 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 1y agoAgree, I think OP doesn’t remember learning to ride a bicycle either.
- kachapopopow 1y agoI read almost half of it before just stopping and clicking away since this article is extremely surface level, but pretends not to by referring to AI usage as 'taste'. Might have missed something in the other half, but doubt it.
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago> There’s been an influx of people telling others to develop taste to use AI. Can someone point out where this influx is happening? The author doesn’t provide any references to this trend so I’m a bit confused why this is a big issue, as it’s literally the first time I’ve ever heard of it
- gdulli 1y agoIt feels like piling on to impugn the taste of the community that went ape for NFT profile pics just a few years ago.
- qsort 1y agoEh, kind of. In a way, AI does not change at all the problem of having taste. There are more books you'll ever read, movies you'll ever watch, games you'll ever play, software you'll ever use. I remain completely unconvinced that "dead internet/dead youtube" is a problem: you had to filter before, you have to filter now. What AI does, being highly weird technology, is that it destroys heuristics. Good English used to be one. It used to take effort to write coherent sentences, that's now gone. Code even just compiling used to be evidence that someone at least made the effort to satisfy the type checker. That's gone as well. I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good "bullshit detector" are now more important than ever.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago<< I do see an argument that taste, a critical attitude and a good "bullshit detector" are now more important than ever. Yes. Oddly, for once, English majors may actually benefit, because they may be better prepared than most to prepare prompts for the jobs of tomorrow ( mild sarcasm, coffee didn't kick in yet ).
- rhetocj23 1y agoI remain convinced that it is those who studied/have a passion for the humanities and liberal arts that will be leading the charge of future product innovation. With all due respect with pure technologists, they just dont understand people, what they need, and how to envision/communicate the benefits.
- Loughla 1y agoYou laugh, but I'm seen as a local/regional expert at prompt engineering in my field because of my background in technical and creative writing learned as an English major. People pay me to help them understand these tools and how to use them in their work. All I'm doing with them is logic and communication. I have zero idea how the tools work, I'm just really good at communicating in a clear and concise manner when I need to.
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- MontyCarloHall 1y agoMost 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? Good taste/bad taste is a subjective function of societal consensus, but having taste/not having taste is objective: you either think for yourself or you don't. Furthermore, the two are uncorrelated: one can have a very strong sense of taste but have it commonly regarded as "bad taste." 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."
- jsharpe 1y ago> 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. :)
- anal_reactor 1y agoI'd like to argue that most people are tasteless and that's actually a good thing. 1. Attention is finite. You can't be tasteful in everything you do. If I dedicate my attention to making tasteful home design, I just don't have the attention to take tasteful photos, and it makes sense that instead I'll just look at photos that someone else prepared. In this scenario, I'm very tasteful in home design, I'm completely tasteless in photography. And that's great. Because the alternative is to be mediocre in everything. 2. It just makes sense that for any given problem, the society would dedicate a small group of individuals to find a tasteful solution, and then apply said solution across the whole population. Most tasteful people are far deep into the territory of diminishing returns, and the attitude of everyone being tasteful simply won't work at the scale of entire society. This means that it's an expectation that most people would be tasteless in most situations, and just follow tasteful people's suggestions - after all, are you going to argue against your doctor, or are you going to just take the prescribed pills, even if theoretically you could improve your treatment by 2%? > 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." That's exactly the most common scenario. Blindly following latest trends will usually result in others perceiving you positively.
- philipp-gayret 1y agoI 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.
- StilesCrisis 1y agoMost manually written repositories are hobby projects where 0% test coverage is fine because it doesn’t matter.
- k__ 1y ago" 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.
- hannasanarion 1y ago> 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. That's because I trust the code that I write to have quality, because I wrote it, which means I understand it. I may choose not to test something because I am certain that nothing can go wrong with it. When your repository is thousands of lines of code written by an AI with tendencies to forget critical components, duplicate work, make bonkers editing errors that shuffles everything around to all the wrong places, and invent packages out of thin air, you need a system of accountability.
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago>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... 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 don't think I've ever worked anywhere that'd accept a PR which introduced untested & undocumented features, in which the code doesn't even pass the company's internal linter. Those feel like very low bars for your colleagues & clients to set.
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoAs 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 1y agoThe 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 1y ago[flagged]
- titzer 1y agoThe most accessible design is not picking colors at all, but letting users or user agents pick the color scheme and only providing the content.
- hypertele-Xii 1y agoDeferring such decisions to the end user is an ABSENCE of design.
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- meindnoch 1y agoAs I get older, I'm more and more convinced that most people are just bad persons. I'm not joking.
- milicat 1y agoOur societies incentivize a bunch of bad behaviors, especially when it comes to projecting the appearance of productivity. So I find that unsurprising.
- Fricken 1y agoI'm not Catholic, but I recognize the seven deadly sins as valid moral precepts by any measure. Capitalism advocates for all of them excepting sloth. Get to work.
- jayd16 1y agoI think especially in the US, we've really normalized and to a degree even celebrate and rewarded being a tactless jerk who cuts corners or worse as long as they get what they want (usually money). Doing hard work for better(quality, moral etc) results is very out of fashion.
- Isamu 1y agoWell that’s true especially with generative art, mashups are generally without regard to taste or aesthetics. On the other hand deliberately tasteless art is a thing, it’s a bit in the eye of the beholder. It’s true that many musicians cater to people who don’t really like music, they want to hear a good story with a beat. And that’s fine. To have taste is to have developed a point of view, it’s not a mystical gift, it’s something you can develop over time. And not everyone needs that.
- Tewboo 1y ago[flagged]
- 5350-uiop-1130 1y agoAI just lets us do the same things but faster if you had bad taste, your taste is just badder faster i think this is why so far there hasnt been any real moment of innovation from AI because its not doing anything new. same crap as before just faster
- rhetocj23 1y agoYeah. I mean another way to think about it is - eating artificially produced food. What happens when you consume it? Your taste for good stuff is eroded away - somehow, the artificial crap is acceptable. Most notably because of its lower price. The same phenonomon with food, will prevail with information.
- topaz0 1y agoFaster is the enemy of taste
- akoboldfrying 1y agoThe whole concept of "taste" being important bothers me, frankly. It's often implied that it's some objective thing, when it's really purely subjective. I accept that it's important socially to present as someone "with good taste", but I genuinely feel any effort in this direction is really just a huge waste of time. Why not just enjoy the things you enjoy? And if the things you enjoy drift over time as you experience more and notice more patterns then fine, but this does not mean the new enjoyable thing is in any objective sense better then the old. Finally, I'm completely fine with a website that looks "exactly like every other website".
- rhetocj23 1y agoIs it subjective to say that Apple had more taste in producing the Mac OS than Microsoft when they produced Windows XP? Its not as subjective.
- oftenwrong 1y agoI have been struggling with some team members who don't have taste, and amplify that via this sort of uncritical application of AI. The issue for one if them seems to be that they think the AI is perfect. They think: "If it comes up with it, it must be good/correct. If people are not using it for everything, they are wasting time doing something that the AI could do." It's frustrating to work with people like this because they rapidly produce bad results. I find it disrespectful to generate a large design document in one go, probably without even reading it, and then put it up for review, wasting the reviewers' time picking it apart. Someone "with taste" could produce something decent to begin with.
- strken 1y agoI 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ricardo81 1y agoI wonder if unknown /s powers persuaded us to homogenise things which ultimately suited AI training for AI to be viable. - search engine algorithms used be be the main place of information discovery. Before 200x it would involve not using javascript for any text you wanted to be readable by a bot - "best viewed in x browser" which happened in the late 90s and early 00s. If a website looked crap, use the other browser. - social graph metadata. Have a better image, title, description for people who see a snippet of your page on a social network Nowadays everything is best viewed in Chrome/Safari, Firefox does have some issues. Google owns the majority of the search market. Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin at least in the Western world drive most social traffic. I would guess the 'taste' of AI has been predetermined by these strong factors on the web. An alternative could be a DMOZ like directory with cohorts voting on the value of things, maybe with the help of AI. It does seem like the web has been 'shaped' for the past 15 years or so.
- rhetocj23 1y agoLol youre giving too much credit to certain people. People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20 years...
- ricardo81 1y agoWhat certain people do you mean? To me it's undeniable that the web has become more centralised, more homogenised, and certain agents find that very convenient. even wiki(pedia|data) is very convenient for large scale training, and most of their sources are from the 'open' web.
- Havoc 1y agoOne more thing to add to the list of tasteless: telling other they’re not doing AI right.
- spacecadet 1y agofomo is not taste.
- jmeaden 1y agoThis "taste" concept has overlap with conscientiousness, a trait that companies look for when hiring. But, it is hard to develop.
- allovertheworld 1y agoAI still a mind virus, vibe coding hasn’t taught me anything. It just allowed me to ship microservices that I dont understand. In the past I would’ve had to learn it through tutorials and docs, and in the end I would be in a better place with my new found knowledge. But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer.
- serf 1y ago>But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer. No. I think you're wrong. 'Vibe coding' (a phrase I hate) introduced me to so many different software packages that I didn't even knew existed. Now, with no LLM subscription, I still use many of the software packages that I discovered via LLMs in my own work. Like any other media, whether or not you use it as a springboard for learning is up to you. Literally every other store of knowledge had critics like you with that same exact opinion (boob-tube, brain-drain, couch-potatos, book-worms) -- and every single one of those forms of media ended up tremendously useful for us. When you watch YouTube you don't have to go watch the most popular asinine shorts; you could use it to learn a language or perhaps some history or a math lesson. Is it bad because a lazy person can be tempted into skipping the work and making the LLM do it? That's because a lazy person is involved -- not because the technology 'is a mind virus'. P.S. 'mind virus' is the stupidest nu-speak crap term I have heard in years. In fact the whole "I don't like the thing so i'm going to give it a scary name" concept has become so tired in recent years that I have a hard time keeping up with the new dictionary -- is this what getting old is like in every era or is this special? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=mind%20virus&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m... Don't go blaming Dawkins, no one said that shit until recently. As with much crap nu-speak it looks like Musk was the one that set it off. Figures.
- criley2 1y agoA lot of people are picking apart the many problematic parts of this, but I'll choose to target "Regurgitating content from the trending influencer of the week." This is fundamentally how humans work. Our civilization is far too large and complex for you to be a bona fide expert in everything. And even worse, the more time you spend dedicated to expertise in one thing, the less well rounded you are in the ~infinity other things. So what do you do if you cannot have authentic "taste" in everything? You trust people. You find "influencers" that seem to succeed and have knowledge and you trust their opinion. In practice, the vast majority of everything we think and do are not because of our personal expertise, but because of our un-expert belief in other people who do these things. Taste isn't just a measure of your personal expertise, but a measure of your ability to find and listen to experts. So to call this out as a negative is harmful. You need to assemble a group of influencers not just professionally, but in every part of your life, who themselves are experts and can lend you their taste so you can make decisions without the paralysis of needing personal expertise in all things. That, or you need infinite time to become an infinite expert.
- grebc 1y agoTo be fair to early comparison between cooking and chefs. Most chefs are largely mediocre, and the ones that are glorified are fine in their restaurant but do not try their recipes at home either - overly complicated with 50 ingredients for a 30 minute dinner and too much technique for it to be practical.
- milicat 1y agoIronically this article reads like it was written by AI.
- jihadjihad 1y agoDe gustibus non est disputandum.
- lucideer 1y agoExcellent, excellent article. I do have one (odd) question though. Perhaps I'm in a bubble (or outside of a bubble), but I don't know what the opening premise of this article is talking about. Namely: > There’s been an influx of people telling others to develop taste to use AI. Designers. Marketers. Developers. All of them touting the same message. I have not seen this influx. I have never heard anyone telling others to "develop taste to use AI". I work with & talk to a lot of developers, designers, marketers across a span of areas so this seems surprising to me. I've talked to outright skeptics, blind fanatics & some in between - the discussions with those "in betweeners" tend to centre more around functional contributions of AI as an aid rather than it's "creative output" & our judgements of same. I have yet to encounter anyone who has strong thoughts on taste w.r.t. AI beyond the polar extremes of "AI can do my creativity for me" & "only use AI for explicitly functional non-taste-related tasks". Am I the only one missing this influx?
- jakebasile 1y agoSo much AI propaganda, like this article, is both AI slop itself while being so weirdly aggressive. You could say that propaganda authors had more taste back in my day.
- Planktonne 1y agoA common trend I have noticed in people who are very pro-AI is that they project their own limitations on others and pretend that they are global concerns.
- llllm 1y ago[dead]
- georgestrakhov 1y agoFirst we shape our tools, then our tools shape our taste. That's the interesting part I think. To the next generation of humans the smell of chatgpt text _may_ actually be the smell of good writing. Wouldn't that be a really interesting tragedy of the commons 2.0?
- analog8374 1y agoBy taste we mean distinguishing pretty from ugly (or more subtly, distinguishing patterns related to that.) Yes, there is an objective reality there. That's basically why some of us are artists and some aren't (that and self-confidence I guess). It's what guides us when there aren't any obvious signposts around. Good artists, scientists and engineers use this faculty all the time. Those who lack the faculty just stick to areas with lots of sign posts.
- brilee 1y agoTaste is the field behind the goalposts, and we as humans are constantly expanding that field by "having taste" and developing taste as a community. https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/taste/ https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/taste/
- kingkongjaffa 1y agoNot without irony that the author finishes with: > The people succeeding with AI aren’t the ones who suddenly discovered taste. They’re the ones who already had it and simply adapted their standards to a new tool. Which is just about the most blatant “it’s not about x it’s about y” tropes that AI writing is drowning in. I do appreciate that they gave some concrete advice on how to curate taste…
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kome 1y agothis discussion about taste and ai is annoying. the world was conformist even before ai. most web design before 2023 was conformist, most pop music was boring, most writing was cliché, corporate speak was already retarded. ai didn't invent banality: we had plenty of it before. why everybody is just repeating safe things, instead of expressing themselves... ai is not en explanation. we should have interrogated ourselves about the whys this happens. complaining about AI is, again, missing the point.
- snoozeZzz 1y agoThis article and title is designed to annoy/troll.
- 1dom 1y agoI think you should elaborate, otherwise the same feedback could be provided for your comment.
- aiven 1y ago> Don’t complain about mediocre work when you’re producing mediocre work yourself. If only tasteful minority will complain - they will soon shrink into tasteful micro-minority. Complaining is still a useful feedback (half the time)