Taste is scalable and everyone coping about LLM's having bad taste, how they will never have good taste, are experiencing the same anxiety and doing the same heels digging as earlier LLM cope about their image models and writing by failing to consider current output is the worst it will ever be. LLM's will quickly surpass average normie taste, aka bourdie's petite bourgiese, who does not need or want, and would not understand, the frontier of new taste as distinction, but will readily appreciate taste competency and 'just enough' forwardness pointing directionally towards the frontier, in the basin of 'good will'; this does scale, to every dimension except the actual generative frontier, which capital already sits wasting to absorb into consumer products, which 'taste' is already defined by curating as a consumer. All an LLM needs to do is detect the moving target of good taste as it consecrates, which is easily imagined with proper scaffolding; and competently decode it, which it can do with ease; and recompose it, which it will continue to improve on. It does not need to generate new material at all; what LLM's will do is raise the ground floor of taste-competency and accelerate the cycle of new trends—consecration, legitimacy, saturation, exhaustion. This is the entire loop of the "high taste person", it has always already been a capital algorithm and personal expression of curated consumerism, the actual generativity on the margins people pretend is what they mean by "good taste" has never been present. You can shed the Apple for Teenage Engineering, and the Teenage Engineering for Alessi, and the Alessi for Hay, and the Hay back around to Ikea; but its just a treadmill of expressing taste-competency, and you're going to lose in the race with machines on it; there is no "soul" you uniquely have that makes you better as consumer positioning to your peers. This entire discourse is a repeat of illustrators coping about AI image generation thinking it would keep producing 6 fingers forever; but for a certain urban culture class. No, you are not special, it is going to be better at window shopping online than you, it will be better at curating your letterbox lists, it will be better at reading the room, it will do camp when it needs to, it will be ironic, it will be sincere. It already can tell you how to navigate most of these things already, your own taste just isn't good enough to give it the right prompts and context. So just like the illustrators, the question you should be thinking about is what actually comes next when LLM's automate the taste/distinction process; which specifically means aesthetic and consumer positioning no longer works for effectively sorting status; and the reason that is, is both because it removes the scarcity to taste competency but also because it makes clear it was never actually about 'personal sensibility' or 'aesthetic sense', Bourdieu's misrecognition. And besides raising the ground floor of competence—no tragedy—it does not actually end status positioning, just decouples it from this form of expressed cultural preference; it will still relocate elsewhere in the continuous chase for distinction, but it not be the same idea of "taste" as an aesthetic sensibility at all.
replugging my essay, “taste is not scalable” where I had the audacity to quote Kant on taste coz this is getting a bit ridiculous. taste in what? art assets? typography? writing? static design? video editing? cinematography? UI? interaction design? UX? taxonomies? copy? TASTE IN WHAT? WHOSE TASTE? AND THEIR TASTE IN WHAT? AND WHAT WILL THAT BEING FORMULISED DO FOR ANYONE?
tech industry didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss human art and creativity so it’s created a new binary definition: taste vs slop. naturally, there were going to be models and companies “solving” for taste. it started with “context”. I don’t mean to diss on this company, I know others too in this space and it’s been the most soulless work to watch which is really something if you’re going to turn “taste” into your category.
you know what’s the real slop? these catchphrases and whoever keeps coming up with them.
ghibli’s work is BEYOND “tasteful”. AI generated ghiblislop is bottom of the trash pile. go figure.
TASTE IS NOT SCALABLE.
sugandha.substack.com/p/tast…