Why tech bros are so worried about AI having bad taste

These days, tech bros keep talking about “taste”— the ability to exercise human judgment and determine unique responses while guiding a machine. It’s a rare skillset, as some AI-made media automates content in the form of generic slop. And now tech professionals are the very people worried that technology will rob society of any real taste. The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka, who broke down tech bros’ obsession with taste last month, coined the term “taste-washing” as the act of giving “anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.” In other words: giving AI properties human-like qualities and letting them run with it. When machines do all the creating, what are we left with? Taste is in right now, especially in tech circles. Chayka first reported on taste and technology in a 2018 essay for Racked, now Vox, called “Style Is an Algorithm.” Chayka now points out that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote that in an AI age “taste will become even more important” in an X post. OpenAI