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 · 47m 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.
banannaise · 40m ago
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 · 45m ago
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.
FuriouslyAdrift · 28m ago
Advertising and public relations has always been applied psychology. The contemporary interation was originally developed by Freuds cousin (Edward Bernays).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
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.
grafmax · 13m ago
And yet it’s the profit motive that has driven the shift to widespread usage of dark patterns and invasive marketing.
literalAardvark · 36m ago
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.
tonyedgecombe · 8m ago
[delayed]
phyzix5761 · 40m ago
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.
esseph · 36m ago
> How do consumers discover new products
By looking them up when they need them
lazide · 15m ago
Sometimes sure, but more often than not they ‘realize’ they need x thing because recently they were told they need x thing. It’s a big oroborous.
CGMthrowaway · 35s ago
OK, Banksy.
9rx · 36m ago
> 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?
Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all the insane laws that surround it.
boringg · 30m ago
Pretty good comment. It's a spectrum right? So if you went all in on profits you are likely all in on tastelessness. If you profit a small amount your probably only shedding a bit of your taste.
However I would wager the argument many people have is that they view their professional life as not utilizing their taste and that is reserved for decisions in their private lives (for those who still keep the two relatively distinct). For those who have truly merged professional and personal and gone all in profit -- original point probably stands. Thats pretty tasteless!
rhetocj23 · 44m ago
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 · 45m ago
> 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 · 48m ago
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 · 42m ago
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 · 33m ago
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.
titzer · 28m ago
The most accessible design is not picking colors at all, but letting users or user agents pick the color scheme and only providing the content.
strken · 38m ago
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.
NackerHughes · 56m 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 · 2m ago
AI 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.
philipp-gayret · 52m ago
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__ · 37m 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 · 31m 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.
StilesCrisis · 43m ago
Most manually written repositories are hobby projects where 0% test coverage is fine because it doesn’t matter.
allovertheworld · 30m ago
AI 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.
MontyCarloHall · 52m ago
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?
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 · 51m 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. :)
fluxusars · 1h ago
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.
jmeaden · 28m ago
agree
ricardo81 · 32m ago
I 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 · 29m ago
Lol youre giving too much credit to certain people.
People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20 years...
ricardo81 · 21m ago
What 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.
kraftman · 1h ago
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 · 36m ago
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.
kraftman · 32m ago
It 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 · 27m ago
Nope, 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 · 15m ago
Surface 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.
meindnoch · 48m ago
As I get older, I'm more and more convinced that most people are just bad persons. I'm not joking.
milicat · 16m ago
Our societies incentivize a bunch of bad behaviors, especially when it comes to projecting the appearance of productivity. So I find that unsurprising.
oftenwrong · 41m ago
I 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.
grebc · 27m ago
To 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.
qsort · 53m ago
Eh, 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.
dsign · 21m ago
>> Good English used to be one.
There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those parameters :-) .
Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often, that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.
I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing (financially) is good marketing.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 40m 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 · 34m ago
I 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.
lucideer · 10m ago
Excellent, 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?
kachapopopow · 56m ago
I 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.
philipwhiuk · 37m ago
Just because you like something very few people like, doesn't mean you have better/more taste than them.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 56m ago
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 · 53m ago
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 · 43m ago
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 · 42m ago
Agree, I think OP doesn’t remember learning to ride a bicycle either.
jihadjihad · 11m ago
De gustibus non est disputandum.
milicat · 15m ago
Ironically this article reads like it was written by AI.
jakebasile · 7m ago
So 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.
jmeaden · 30m ago
This "taste" concept has overlap with conscientiousness, a trait that companies look for when hiring. But, it is hard to develop.
chiffre01 · 52m ago
Seems like most of the 'tasteless' habits in the article are also just laziness.
tropicalfruit · 45m ago
AI 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
topaz0 · 27m ago
Faster is the enemy of taste
rhetocj23 · 40m ago
Yeah.
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.
Isamu · 46m ago
Well 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.
jbreckmckye · 33m ago
I only skimmed the article. But I think "taste", in the context of technology design, is a funny thing, because you want your product to look _similar enough_ to everything else for customers to recognise it, understand it, categorise it easily, but not _so similar_ to the mean that it resembles "slop".
Think Bootstrap or Material UI landing sites. Using a variant of those designs - big hero images, colourful buttons - makes your website look like it fits into the world. But use the default themes and it just looks lazy.
So there is always a tension in being attractive, you have to look unique, but still part of the species.
Havoc · 11m ago
One more thing to add to the list of tasteless: telling other they’re not doing AI right.
gdulli · 54m ago
It feels like piling on to impugn the taste of the community that went ape for NFT profile pics just a few years ago.
AndrewKemendo · 55m 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
criley2 · 29m ago
A 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.
t0lo · 1h ago
I'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 · 57m ago
Yeah it’s a lot of projection.
add-sub-mul-div · 47m ago
I read it again but I can't figure out what you mean here.
BolexNOLA · 55m ago
Just 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.
spacecadet · 31m ago
fomo is not taste.
akoboldfrying · 45m ago
The 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 · 31m ago
Is it subjective to say that Apple had more taste in producing the Mac OS then Microsoft when they produced Windows XP?
Its not as subjective.
Tewboo · 46m ago
AI has fundamentally changed the landscape, making even the most basic tech feel like a quantum leap from the past.
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.
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.
I don't think that's particularly controversial. Profitability doesn't imply tastelessness, but profit motive certainly does.
Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
I highly recommend The Century of the Self for a great documentary on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
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.
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.
By looking them up when they need them
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?
Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all the insane laws that surround it.
However I would wager the argument many people have is that they view their professional life as not utilizing their taste and that is reserved for decisions in their private lives (for those who still keep the two relatively distinct). For those who have truly merged professional and personal and gone all in profit -- original point probably stands. Thats pretty tasteless!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But with vibe coding, there is no knowledge transfer.
Not only possible, but exactly what AI does. :)
- 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.
People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20 years...
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.
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.
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.
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.
There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those parameters :-) .
Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often, that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.
I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing (financially) is good marketing.
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 ).
With all due respect with pure technologists, they just dont understand people, what they need, and how to envision/communicate the benefits.
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?
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.
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.
You could say that propaganda authors had more taste back in my day.
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
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.
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.
Think Bootstrap or Material UI landing sites. Using a variant of those designs - big hero images, colourful buttons - makes your website look like it fits into the world. But use the default themes and it just looks lazy.
So there is always a tension in being attractive, you have to look unique, but still part of the species.
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
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.
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.
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".
Its not as subjective.