You Had No Taste Before AI

What “Taste” Means (and Whether the Article Gets It Right)

• Several argue the author conflates “taste” with craftsmanship, standards, and conscientiousness (proofreading, self-review, quality control).
• Some suggest better terms: tact, class, or professionalism; others defend a narrower definition of taste as autonomous, critical judgment vs mindless copying.
• A recurring point: you can have “taste” even if the majority thinks your taste is bad; it’s about thinking for yourself, not about being popular.

AI Value: Surface-Level Help vs Deep Understanding

• One camp: AI is transformative for everyday, “surface” questions (shopping, DIY, translation, boilerplate emails, CLI flags). They see it as a faster interface to common knowledge.
• Another camp: in deep domains (e.g., corporate finance, complex coding), AI regurgitates shallow patterns, can’t generalize or apply concepts well, and promotes “vibe coding” without real learning.
• People note AI removes old heuristics like “good English = serious effort” or “code compiles = someone thought it through,” making taste and bullshit-detection more important.

Taste, Profit, and Capitalism

• One thread claims maximizing profit is inherently tasteless and drives dark patterns, invasive advertising, and homogenized, lowest-common-denominator products.
• Others push back: profit can simply signal that people value something; many beautiful artifacts were funded by surplus profit. Problem is unchecked greed, not profit itself.
• Debate over advertising:
  • Some see it as necessary discovery and sometimes genuinely useful.
  • Others equate “paid promotion” with lying and manipulation, especially with tracking and microtargeting.
  • Accessibility and “late-stage capitalism” rhetoric are questioned as overused or vague.

Subjective vs Objective Taste

• One side insists taste/beauty is largely social and time-bound (fashions, body ideals, design trends); taste = peer pressure and status.
• Others argue there are timeless, objective elements (craft, coherence, proportion), and that experts can distinguish “taste” from mere fashion.
• Discussion touches on “tastemakers” vs “tastetakers”: few people can or should be tasteful about everything; most rationally rely on experts/influencers in many domains.

AI, Homogenization, and Quality in Practice

• Several note the world was already conformist and filled with clichés; AI mostly accelerates existing mediocrity (“bad taste, just faster”).
• Complaints that some coworkers over-trust AI, dumping long, unedited AI documents or code for others to clean up, are framed as both laziness and lack of taste.
• Others report a double standard: teams suddenly impose strict style, linting, and coverage requirements on AI-generated code that human-written repos never met.
• Some worry future generations may internalize “AI smell” as what good writing looks like, shifting norms of taste.

Reception of the Article Itself

• Many find the piece clickbaity, shallow, or self-contradictory, especially the premise of an “influx” of people preaching about taste in AI, which commenters say they rarely see.
• Others find it insightful in highlighting how generative tools expose underlying lack of judgment: when curation is on you, tastelessness becomes more obvious.