The Anatomy of Taste

We keep talking about taste like it is some ethereal, untouchable thing.

Lately, though, the tech crowd has a very different take: taste is just another engineering benchmark on a roadmap. The argument says taste is merely high-level pattern recognition, an intuitive grasp of balance, colour palettes, rhythm and tone. Because large language models can chew through centuries of culture and spit out balanced designs or lyrical sentences in seconds, people are starting to say that taste is not a permanent boundary at all. It is just an optimisation problem, and the machines are already crossing it.

I completely disagree.

That view mistakes the canvas for the painter. It treats taste as a technical output, when in reality it is a deeply human relationship between an expression, a story and an audience.

What actually is taste?

At its core, taste is a kind of self-expression. That self can be an individual artist, or it can be the collective ethos of a brand or an organisation standing up and declaring: we want to be like this, not that.

Society has always placed its highest regard on originality. Whether we are talking about a tailored jacket, a canvas, a piece of furniture or any other object of desire, we do not fall in love with statistical averages. We gravitate towards deliberate, risky departures from the norm.

An AI model has no self to express. It has no reputation to defend, no lived childhood, no broken heart and no stake in the outcome. It operates on pure probability distributions, predicting what fits based on precedent. It can produce visual symmetry or effortless cadence all day long for near-zero cost.

When clean aesthetic harmony becomes dirt cheap and infinite, the cultural value of that harmony collapses. You do not win points anymore just for making something that looks balanced. Rarity moves elsewhere.

The story behind the process matters more

Taste is never evaluated in a sensory vacuum. It is decided at the receiving end, by the viewer looking at both the object and the story of how it came to exist.

Take mechanical watches. A five-dollar battery-powered quartz watch keeps better time than a handcrafted Patek Philippe. Yet people willingly spend tens of thousands of dollars on the mechanical watch. They are not paying for utility. They are paying for the friction: the resistance of the metal, the heritage, the physical patience of a watchmaker bent over tiny gears.

Or look at what happened when cameras automated realistic imagery. Painters did not close their studios and give up. They pivoted inward and invented impressionism, cubism and abstract art. The value shifted from copying reality to interpreting it through a subjective, mortal human mind.

Think about art forgeries, too. A master forgery can match an original painting atom for atom. The visual beauty is identical. But the second the lab proves it is a fake, its value drops to zero. The object did not change at all. Only the story about its origin changed.

Taste is a proxy for human trust. When you connect with a work, you are reaching for the presence of another conscious being who wrestled with constraints, made a hard choice and stood behind it.

Can machines build their own stories?

This does not mean automated systems cannot have a narrative.

Imagine an apparel brand that skips traditional artisan workshops entirely. Instead, an engineer builds an autonomous pipeline of AI agents that scans cultural shifts, generates efficient zero-waste clothing silhouettes and coordinates production directly with factories.

Is that bad taste? Not necessarily. It is a brand-new kind of story.

Much like the Bauhaus movement in the 1920s celebrated tubular steel and the reality of the assembly line instead of apologising for it, modern audiences can find genuine aesthetic power in radical computational efficiency. But notice where the meaning comes from: it still comes from human intention framing the system as a cultural statement. The code generates the shapes, but human perspective turns the pipeline into a point of view.

Why skin in the game is the real barrier

Could an AI eventually develop an intrinsic point of view all on its own, without a human steering it?

I think it can. Just like AlphaGo played Move 37 against Lee Sedol, defying centuries of human game theory with a move that seemed alien at first, a machine can develop its own internal logic and non-human aesthetic patterns.

The real question is: will humans care?

It is up to humans to accept that output as valuable, and looking at how our culture works, genuine taste requires the creator to have skin in the game. Intrinsic coherence alone is never enough.

To see why, consider a thought experiment. Suppose a creative director builds an entirely AI-generated fashion brand, with zero hand drawings and zero human-written copy. But this person takes out a second mortgage on their family home, quits their day job and gambles their life savings to manufacture the line. If it fails, they are bankrupt.

Does that financial risk mean the collection now possesses genuine taste?

It makes for a provocative story, but it is still not genuine taste.

A financial bet is not artistic conviction. A gambler placing their life savings on a roulette wheel has immense skin in the game, but nobody confuses placing a bet with making art.

If that synthetic clothing brand flops, the investor’s bank account takes a hit, but their soul was never on the line. They did not expose their private grief, their awkward obsessions or their own vulnerable view of the world. They can easily walk away, shrug and blame the algorithm.

True artistic skin in the game does not offer an escape hatch. It requires you to put your personal perspective on the line and say: this is how I see reality, and if you think it is shallow, you are calling a part of me shallow.

A model cannot do that. It cannot bleed, it cannot face social embarrassment and it has no mortal life to lose.

The paradox of this essay

That brings this whole conversation to an interesting mirror.

What is the value of this essay you are reading right now?

These words were synthesised by an artificial intelligence. The prose was organised by a model that has no fear of rejection, no reputation on the line and no soul to reveal. By the very definition I have laid out, the software that generated these sentences cannot claim genuine taste.

Yet this essay did not appear out of thin air. It is the artefact of a direct conversation between an AI and me, Niteesh. It exists because I brought a conviction to the screen, challenged the tech consensus and pushed back against easy answers to pinpoint where human meaning actually lives.

The machine supplied rapid synthesis and structure. The human supplied the friction, the direction and the core idea.

So, does this essay carry real value, or is it just another piece of automated mimicry?

The algorithm cannot answer that. That judgement belongs entirely to you, the person on the receiving end, deciding your own definition of taste.