taste

Marisa Aragón Ware. All year I’ve been reading about taste. Someone somewhere identified that one of the things AI can’t do is “taste.” Now it seems a certain part of the world can’t stop talking about taste, and much of it is trying to define taste, presumably to boil it down into a useful prompt. This is a bit of a shift from the prevailing notion of “you’re allowed to like stuff,” which turned into “can’t we just let people enjoy things,” which quickly warped into “you have to like everything or you are a monster.” Especially if lots of other people seem to like it, which is one reason why the mainstream culture is so completely flat right now. Taste was demonised by poptimists who defined themselves as victims of those with taste. And now everyone’s turned around and gone, oh shit, the robots can create everything I said I liked and I’m a slop-eater. There is no status or cultural cache in that. People are freaking the fuck out. They’re trying to find out what taste even is.…