Ask HN: What's the Fuzz about Taste? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the Fuzz about Taste?

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For different reasons in the last 2 weeks I've found myself speaking to CTOs / CPOs that believe "Taste" is the main distinction and value a human brings to the process in a LLM/Generative AI world.

I'm simply not getting it, and I don't know what I'm missing.

+ Self-driving as an example: We only really care if it drives better or equal to a human. So no taste applies there, once the standards are met.

Don't get me wrong, I understand (and share) that we use a concept of "taste" to actually mean "there is no enough data for the model to give a right answer", and the "judgement we introduce after years of living may be better". But I don't buy into the idea that exercising that decision (our free will if we may), is the actual difference simple because it is perceived as less stochastic.

So, is taste another way of saying you still know better? Or am I truly, and likely, missing something here?

PS: Apologies for overly simplifying the concept.

Emily Segal has excellent reporting on 'tasteslop'

https://nemesisglobal.substack.com/p/tasteslop

More practically, people who work at AI startups are starting to realize that money and power can't fix everything and they are being met with hostility.

I have met several people working at frontier labs who legitimately feel that what they are doing is making the world a worse place and that a disgusting amount of money is not enough to assuage their apprehensions. They cannot even look people in the eye and tell them what they do. Maybe shame is good op-sec.

You've all managed to successfully alienate the entire creative class.

In any case, C-suite has realized that the regulatory regime depends on public consumer sentiment. The current range of products do not pacify the masses. There is a real, visceral feeling that these tools are polluting the world around us with low-quality media with malicious purposes by a growing cadre of vying interests.

Great article, I loved it! A few parts will stay with me.

The Idiosyncrasy dimension seems to be what I was missing the most. That relative and social aspect beyond discernment and pattern recognition.

This is the powerful quote, because taste wasn't a top concern until mass production appeared: "Tech’s surging obsession with taste is therefore not really about aesthetics; it reflects a deep anxiety about whether economic capital can capture cultural capital at the exact moment cultural capital becomes crucial for technology’s distribution, relevance, and differentiation."

Thanks!!!

> So, is taste another way of saying you still know better?

I think that's part of the picture, and that applies to "how to respond to LLM output" but I think people are getting at the stuff that happens before you even reach for the LLM. Taste dictates what you decide is non-negotiable, i.e. the goal of what you're doing. So yeah, what you choose to do differentiates you because it's an expression of your goals and values. It's kind of vacuously true, and probably worth each of us thinking how we can be more authentically ourselves and how to guide ourselves through decisions. No one can make them for you, letting others make your life's decisions has always resulted in slop. So how much can you outsource and still be yourself? I know I could ask someone to make my breakfast each day and I'd still be me, but I wouldn't expect that to be true of everyone. Maybe it's true for a lot of chefs, but probably not all of them. We're complicated like that.

This is something that concerns me about this technology. It's just not going to serve some people well to reach their goals. The odds weren't right. Not enough context. No clear way to surface the right context. The result is a kind of loneliness, but it's the kind when you've got a bunch of shallow "friends," when you really need a mentor who doesn't have a plan for you, who is truly wiser than you, or can see you from the distance required to advise, can step away, has real life experiences.

That loneliness reminds me of a creative process looking for a blackswan. Years, <building/creating/innovating> by yourself, trying to give value and deliver something that matters.

Trust starts to be key in those scenarios, and LLMs definitely don't have it from us rn.

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