Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste
With artificial intelligence continuing to dominate corporate strategies and news headlines, Silicon Valley has embraced a new buzzword, one that may feel too close to home for those already feeling embattled by automation. That word is “taste,” and in recent months it has become as much of a tech-world cliché as “disruption” was in the twenty-tens. The esteemed technologist Paul Graham posted on X, “In the AI age, taste will become even more important.” Koen Bok, a founder of the booming A.I. design tool Framer, said on a podcast that “great taste” is what will create the best new products. The bookmarking app Sublime promises to build “a library that reflects your taste,” with the help of A.I.-driven recommendations. The entrepreneur and former Bytedance engineer Cong Wang echoed a new Silicon Valley axiom in a blog post, writing, “In the AI era, personal taste is the moat”—“moat” being entrepreneur lingo for an unreplicable advantage, the thing that makes your company stand out above its competitors. Startups apparently need taste like A.I. needs data centers.
For tech bros, the word seems to have a pragmatic function. By their definition, taste is inherently profitable; it is the ability to discern what will make the most money, whether by choosing your next big software concept or by convincing users that your product is necessary. “The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it,” Graham wrote in an essay from 2002, which he referenced in his recent post. This emphasis on tasteful decision-making makes sense, given that A.I. is gradually democratizing technological production. With the newly powerful likes of Anthropic’s Claude Code assistant, anyone can theoretically program anything—a chatbot companion that surveils you 24/7, for example, or an A.I. matchmaker that helps you land a date. The only task left is to decide what to make, as one might request a wish from a genie. Hence a comment made last year by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, that, once the A.I. era is fully upon us, V.C., the art of picking worthy investments, “may be one of the last remaining fields.” Of course, he may be somewhat biased.
The uptick in concern about taste is both surprising and discomfiting, because the word comes with particular generational baggage. A decade or two ago, millennial hipsters made a claim to good taste by exercising their preference for, say, craft India pale ales over Budweiser, Arcade Fire over Nickelback, or American Apparel over Abercrombie & Fitch. Hipster identity was built on what one chose to consume, and a fetishization of the lo-fi, the handcrafted, and the artisanal—qualities that were eventually co-opted and absorbed by corporate behemoths such as Meta, via Instagram, and Amazon, via Whole Foods. Now A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to a similar aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence. Last year, Anthropic hosted a pop-up café in Manhattan (what could be more hipster?) and gave away baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking.” OpenAI’s recent Super Bowl commercial, titled “You Can Just Build Things,” is shot, with faux-analog cinematographic flair, from a human point of view, with hands gripping the handlebars of a bike, writing in a notebook, and playing chess—never mind that the thing being advertised is a hypothetically omniscient robot. You, too, can be tasteful, the ad seems to say, if only you choose the right chatbot to run your life.
A.I. companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley. Many people view A.I. tools as a threat—to their livelihoods, to their futures, to their senses of self. Few, whom I know, see them as individuality-affirming life-style choices. We might call what’s going on now “taste-washing,” an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism. The Times perpetuated this mythmaking when it launched a poll last week asking users to read passages drawn from well-known works of literature, and passages generated by A.I., and choose which they preferred stylistically. Nearly fifty per cent of participants preferred the texts written by artificial intelligence. Is A.I. now so adept that it can write like Hilary Mantel? Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted—so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz—that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.
The jostling hordes of A.I. boosters crow over new ventures launching at dizzying scales and speeds, mediating every facet of daily life. These include A.I. actors, A.I. travel agents, A.I. sommeliers, A.I. eulogy generators, A.I. virtual pets, and A.I. toothbrushes that give you “real-time feedback” on how to brush. The text-editing software Grammarly recently added (and promptly removed) a feature that gave users notes on their writing from chatbot versions of well-known writers, appropriating their sensibilities without getting permission. However discerning the humans behind these endeavors fancy themselves to be, A.I. remains a fundamentally tasteless technology, in at least one respect. The eighteenth-century French philosophers who established a definition of taste in Western thought considered it an ineffable quality, a reminder that the God-given goodness in each of us recognizes that of the rest of the world. Voltaire once wrote that, “in order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it.” No large language model has yet been programmed to feel anything, and no number of branded baseball caps is going to change that. ♦