by Kyle Munkittrick
Silicon Valley has rediscovered ‘taste.’ Maybe it was Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions. Maybe it’s Substack aesthetes like Henry Oliver and David Hoang. Maybe it’s everyone trying to figure out if AI can have taste. But taste is, in every case, either ill or incorrectly defined, if at all. Let’s fix that.
Taste is the valuing of craft.
That is, taste is the ability to assess and appreciate a work based on deep understanding of techniques and skills used in the work’s creation, whether it’s a car, a novel, an app, a song, or an outfit.
In Jasmine Sun and Robin Sloan’s Utopia Debate “Can AI have taste?”, Sun argued that if the YouTube or Spotify algorithm ever gave you a good recommendation, then yes AI has taste, because it understood and recreated your taste.
No. Algorithms understand your preferences. Taste is not your preferences. Preferences are, however, the thing most commonly conflated with taste.
Your preferences are intuitive taste—a starting point. Preferences rarely ever fully match with taste. That is what a guilty pleasure is! You like it even though you know it’s not good (Stranger Things), or hate it even though it is (Hemingway). Paying close attention to what you like is an excellent way of building taste. Preferences are a great signal that something might be good.
The opening paragraph of Roger Ebert’s review of the Mummy is a perfect demonstration of his exceptional taste being in seeming conflict with his preferences:
There is within me an unslaked hunger for preposterous adventure movies. I resist the bad ones, but when a “Congo” or an “Anaconda” comes along, my heart leaps up and I cave in. “The Mummy” is a movie like that. There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.
Ebert contrasts his judgement of the craft (script, direction, acting, effects) with his visceral delight. His pleasure was, by his own admission, unreasonable. That is, unlike many movies he loved, he cannot entirely explain or justify his delight.
There are a few ways to interpret this vis-a-vis taste. One is that taste isn’t objective or based on craft, it’s ineffable. Another is that Ebert didn’t have good enough taste to explain and justify why he liked The Mummy. Both of these are obvious nonsense. Read more »
