Taste is a very subjective thing, but I think in a lot of the things described in the article there is a clear better or worse. I would describe that as craftsmanship or attention to detail, more of a craft than an art.
agree
You Had No Taste Before AI
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Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings. Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even know they’ve lost taste for a significant amount of time.
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The most accessible design is not picking colors at all, but letting users or user agents pick the color scheme and only providing the content.
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts. Absolutely not. Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to compensate you to use whatever you’ve made. Art is rarely profitable for its own sake, but that doesn’t mean everything that is profitable is intrinsically devoid of taste.
Maybe by the textbook definition, sure. Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
Advertising and public relations has always been applied psychology. The contemporary interation was originally developed by Freuds nephew (Edward Bernays).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
I highly recommend The Century of the Self for a great documentary on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#64AI just lets us do the same things but faster if you had bad taste, your taste is just badder faster i think this is why so far there hasnt been any real moment of innovation from AI because its not doing anything new. same crap as before just faster
Faster is the enemy of taste
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. The people who had low standards in the first place find it transformative. If you have high standards, its regurgitating info in an ill disciplined fashion. Because its input isn't really of the highest standard upon which the model is trained on.
It regurgitates info in a way that is very specific to what and how you requested it. If you ask it a question already having an estimate of how accurate its answers will be, you can get a lot of value from it.
Nope, Ive tested its understanding on things like corporate finance which I know very deeply.
It touches surface level stuff - which makes sense, most stuff on the internet is surface level. Good enough to pass an exam (since exams are essentially memorisation and regurigation of that nowadays) but not enough depth of understanding to be able to apply it in a wide range of contexts.
The application is where all the value is in the real world.
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#66To be fair to early comparison between cooking and chefs. Most chefs are largely mediocre, and the ones that are glorified are fine in their restaurant but do not try their recipes at home either - overly complicated with 50 ingredients for a 30 minute dinner and too much technique for it to be practical.
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#67Eh, kind of. In a way, AI does not change at all the problem of having taste. There are more books you'll ever read, movies you'll ever watch, games you'll ever play, software you'll ever use. I remain completely unconvinced that "dead internet/dead youtube" is a problem: you had to filter before, you have to filter now. What AI does, being highly weird technology, is that it destroys heuristics. Good English used to…
>> Good English used to be one.
There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those parameters :-) .
Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often, that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.
I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing (financially) is good marketing.
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#68I wonder if unknown /s powers persuaded us to homogenise things which ultimately suited AI training for AI to be viable. - search engine algorithms used be be the main place of information discovery. Before 200x it would involve not using javascript for any text you wanted to be readable by a bot - "best viewed in x browser" which happened in the late 90s and early 00s. If a website looked crap, use the other browser…
Lol youre giving too much credit to certain people. People have trouble thinking 2 years out, let alone 5, 10, 15, 20 years...
What certain people do you mean?
To me it's undeniable that the web has become more centralised, more homogenised, and certain agents find that very convenient.
even wiki(pedia|data) is very convenient for large scale training, and most of their sources are from the 'open' web.
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#69As I get older, I'm more and more convinced that most people are just bad persons. I'm not joking.
Our societies incentivize a bunch of bad behaviors, especially when it comes to projecting the appearance of productivity. So I find that unsurprising.
Re: You Had No Taste Before AI
#70Ironically this article reads like it was written by AI.