Taste Came First: Build It, Then Use AI

The author argues that people calling for “AI taste” often lacked taste before AI; the core skill is timeless critical judgment and aesthetic discernment. AI merely amplifies and reveals mediocrity, making breadth of taste especially valuable as users switch across domains. Build taste deliberately through comparison, studying excellence, iterative refinement, and demanding proof from those who preach it.

Key Points

Taste—critical judgment and aesthetic discernment—predates AI and should have been practiced all along.
AI accelerates output but exposes existing mediocrity; many critics of AI-generated slop produced tasteless work before AI.
Taste manifests as contextual appropriateness, quality recognition, iterative refinement, and ethical boundaries.
Breadth of taste (cross-domain judgment) is especially valuable with AI, while depth helps but can make experts more AI-reluctant.
Develop taste deliberately through comparison, studying exemplars, iterative improvement, and scrutinizing the credibility of those preaching about taste.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment is skeptical to critical. While there is genuine engagement with the article's kernel of insight — that people with preexisting taste use AI better — the dominant mood is dismissive of the article's execution, framing, and tone. A majority of commenters find the article preachy, self-undermining, and ironic in its own tastelessness. The thread is not anti-AI broadly, but it is largely anti-this-article: the piece is seen as clickbait, as projection, and as the very kind of surface-level content it claims to criticize.

In Agreement

AI exposes people who lack genuine taste because it hands them an open palette where pre-curated safe choices no longer protect them from having to make real judgments
Taste is distinct from fashion and can be developed into something more durable — tasteful designers make coherent choices regardless of era
People who had high standards before AI still apply those standards through it; the technology amplifies preexisting disposition rather than replacing judgment
A bullshit detector and critical attitude are more essential now that AI has destroyed heuristics like well-written prose and compiling code as signals of effort
Taste has objective elements that transcend mere subjectivity — practitioners in any domain recognize quality across time and fashion
Vibe coding without reflective engagement produces code people do not understand, creating a real knowledge-transfer problem

Opposed

The article's opening premise is a strawman — multiple commenters had never encountered the influx of AI-taste preachers it claims to rebut
The article itself reads like AI-generated motivational blog slop: surface-level, empty of real substance, written in formulaic trope structures that AI writing is drowning in
Taste is thoroughly subjective and socially determined; what looks like objective taste is just the consensus of people with cultural power in a given era
Mediocrity, conformism, and cliched corporate-speak all predate AI by decades; blaming AI for tastelessness misses the actual social causes
The article conflates taste with laziness or carelessness — not proofreading an email is not a failure of taste, it is a failure of care
Most people are necessarily tasteless in most domains due to finite attention, and that is fine — delegating taste to experts is efficient, not a moral failing
Pro-AI commenters tend to project their own pre-AI limitations onto everyone else and present them as universal problems
AI generates bland, formulaic output trained on consensus internet writing — it cannot produce taste because taste requires genuine individual perspective and risk