What Defines Taste in the AI Era?

What began as a novelty only a few years ago has now evolved into outsourcing much of daily life to AI. But we know that when everything flattens to the middle and starts to look and sound the same, the edges of culture become so much more interesting. In the race to optimize and outperform (this is the mantra from every C-suite), the people actually making, curating, and interpreting culture are perhaps more important than ever.

Taste, in the traditional sense, has always been gatekept by a certain elite set of editors (hello, cerulean blue). Now, anyone, for better or worse, can become an expert if they learn how to influence the algorithm. We’ll save our discussion of the performativity of the internet dilettante for another newsletter, but for now, we want to focus on the elusive nature of taste. It’s probably not a coincidence that Jeff Bezos “bought out” the Met Gala, or that Mark Zuckerberg was sat front row at a Prada show in Milan. Silicon Valley has become obsessed with “taste” precisely because so much else is becoming automated and “frictionless.” Earlier this year, Paul Graham – the co-founder of Y Combinator – argued that when anyone can make anything, what matters is what you choose to make. Soon after, Greg Brockman, one of the key figures behind ChatGPT, declared that “taste is a new core skill.” Big Tech has realized that taste is something carefully learned over time – not something that can be optimized.

In The New Yorker, critic Kyle Chayka describes “taste-washing” as the way tech borrows the look and language of culture to feel more human. You can see it in how AI companies are starting to behave more like lifestyle brands. Anthropic, for example, recently teamed up with Air Mail—founded by Graydon Carter—on a Manhattan pop-up where people were encouraged to put away their phones and read printed essays instead.

Once upon a time, “authenticity” was the buzzword for brands trying to appeal to Millennials – but somehow that word feels both hollow yet extremely relevant. So, what’s next? We’re going to keep thinking about that…but we know one thing for certain: critical thinking, just like taste, is an art we’ll need to spend extra time developing. Because friction and failure sometimes lead to the most interesting work.