thoughts on taste
Recently, there’s been an active online discussion about taste, especially in the context of AI. The argument goes like this: when anyone can build or generate anything, craft is no longer the hard part. It is deciding what is worth making in the first place.
Intuitively, that seems right. But it's also vague. What even is taste? Do people mean personal preference? Or a sense for quality? Or rather an understanding of what other people will like? Part of the confusion is that taste has different meanings.
Personal taste
Personal taste is what resonates with you as an individual. The music you play, the films you watch, or the clothes you wear. I don’t think personal taste is something you "have". It develops through exposure and evaluation. When you come across something, and then pause and ask yourself: Do I like this? Why? Why not? What about it works for me? What doesn’t?
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That pause matters. A lot of people consume, but don’t evaluate. They listen, watch, scroll, buy, travel, but never stop to notice what they are drawn to and why. For those people, experience builds up, but taste doesn’t develop along with it.
And even when people do evaluate, it can go wrong. You tell yourself you like something, but really it's because your friends and family do, or because it signals the right things to your followers. You replace evaluation with imitation. That's borrowed taste.
Building taste, and learning the difference between what you actually like and what you think you like, is hard.
Taste as judgment?
I think taste is not only preference, it is also a form of judgment: the ability to tell when something is well made (even if it is not fully to your personal taste). I may not want to wear something or listen to a certain album, but I can still see when it is well done.
This is where taste overlaps with literacy. The more you understand a medium and its vocabulary, the more you can see. Certain differences stop looking arbitrary and you begin to notice why one choice seems lazy while another feels precise.
The more literate you become in a medium, the better your judgment gets. Not your preferences, but your ability to identify quality.
Social taste
Social taste is completely separate from personal taste. It is what a group, community or subculture considers tasteful or embarrassing at any given time. Some of it is based on personal taste of individuals and generalizable – people tend to prefer symmetry, proportion, harmony. Those are objective preferences of a group. But a lot of it is a social construct – a set of arbitrary rules a group agrees on, often for reasons that have little to do with quality (like fashion; Scott Alexander writes about this well).
When someone says "that person has no taste," they usually mean that person is breaking the local rules. (Sometimes they mean the person really has no personal taste, but that is not a defensible statement to make from the outside and therefore I don't think people really mean it).
Taste as an obstacle
Taste should deepen enjoyment. But sometimes, as you start developing taste, you face the opposite problem. Here are three examples I can think of:
- Taste can become a way of looking down on other people for their choices. Someone puts on a track they love, and instead of just listening, you hear "bad taste." It stops being about quality and becomes about status.
- Taste can also make you more self-conscious. Once you know enough about a field, you stop just choosing what you like and start thinking about how your choice will be read by others. You are no longer listening to the music you want. You are choosing the album that makes you seem like the kind of person who would listen to it.
- Taste can also narrow enjoyment if it becomes too rigid. If your taste is so developed that you can no longer enjoy a simple pop song or a cheesy chorus, then your taste limits you.
Taste, curation, and attention
While writing this, I realized how closely taste connects to curation and attention. In that sense, this feels like a continuation of my previous two posts thoughts on curation and were you there?.
Curation: I think curation is one way of building taste. Choosing, saving, omitting. Each act of selection sharpens personal taste and judgment a little.
Attention: But that only works if attention is there. Taste is not built through exposure alone. The same activity can either deepen taste or leave it unchanged. It depends on the quality of your attention.
If taste is becoming more important, what does that mean in practice?
For me it means experience and evaluate. Be honest about what you like. Develop your judgment. And most importantly, make sure your taste is actually yours – not something you absorbed from a feed, a scene, or a trend.
It also means not letting taste work against you. The point is to enjoy and understand more, not to perform for others or look down on them.
Choose actively instead of drifting along with whatever is put in front of you.
Open questions (for another post or discussion?)
- So, some people say that when execution gets cheap, taste becomes the differentiator. But is that true? When photography arrived, people said the same thing – the machine does the work, all you need is an eye. And then photography became its own craft. Will the same happen with AI?
- Does taste in one domain make you more likely to develop it in others?
- Is "guilty pleasure" just a phrase for when your personal taste and social taste conflict?
- If you can't articulate your taste, do you fully have it?
- How much of personal taste is really "mine" and how much of it is just social taste that I have absorbed?
- Can you build taste without building snobbery, or is some amount of exclusion built into taste itself?
- Are tastemakers just creating new group codes that others follow?
- What is the relationship between taste and originality?
- If execution gets cheap, taste matters more. But does cheap execution also erode the conditions under which taste develops?
