No Skill. No Taste

There's been a lot of discussion around in the future how "taste" will be the only differentiation / moat (recently watched a good video about the gen-ai music industry), as everything will be trivially easy to recreate. But your vision and how well you execution it... and the nuance involved in getting every minor detail correct is much harder (and something the LLM is exactly average at). I recently experienced this while vibing the duckdb vscode extension "I always wanted". Code is 100% LLM generated, but I think I probably have well over 1000 turns of conversation at this point to make every detail exactly as I want it.

Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

I don't know where this leaves us, but it's going to be interesting/scary to live through what seems to be coming.

Here's another thing: I think spending too much time with generative AI makes your taste worse, by habituating you to stuff that's pretty bad.

I think it's a sort of slot machine effect, you get used to losing and when something goes slightly well you wildly overestimate how good it is. You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation. Because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output, because that output is not all that great.

It looks good compared to all the failed generations though!

Also, spending all your time cranking the slot machine handle and occasionally winning convinces your brain that you have a magic ability at cranking the slot machine handle, when actually you were at best slightly lucky. So you get people who convince themselves they are geniuses at using AI when they are actually average or slightly above average.

> You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation, and because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output

Is this actually true? I know of no artists nor programmers who used to have strict requirements, careful eyes and "good taste" who after playing around with AI suddenly dropped those things, that'd be very against basically their personality.

Do you have any concrete and practical examples of any currently public artists you've seen be affected by this?

An intuition for what people like.

Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.

> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

No offense, but only someone without taste would say this ;)

Taste is not easy to copy. If that were true then there would be no bad major Hollywood movies in established genres; yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the formulaic superhero genre, we still get stinkers like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter.

If you actually try looking at places where people show off their taste--scrolling through the latest songs on Soundcloud being a great source--you realize that people just pump out terrible stuff without realizing it's terrible. This was true pre-AI, and AI it hasn't made it any less true.

It's similar to the transition from live instruments to the DAW in the music world. The DAW eliminated all physical training requirements for making music, and opened up massive new worlds for the types of music that could be made. The end result was a handful of great things amidst a sea of garbage.