Can Silicon Valley give AI good taste?

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**Meghan McCarty Carino** (0:31)
The quest to give AI good taste. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino.
Generative AI can produce enormous volumes of text, images and video in seconds.
But without expert human instruction, the output is often generic, mid. You might say, slop. Correcting for this has become one of the tech world's latest obsessions. Taste, they say, is the new bottleneck. It could be our moat, the special spark that only humans can bring. But of course, Silicon Valley abhors a bottleneck, and there are already startups proposing a tech solution. Writer Sophie Haigney covers art, culture and tech, and she's here to unpack what taste is and whether AI could ever replicate it.

**Sophie Haigney** (1:34)
I mean, I think in its most basic sense, taste is just about what you respond to, how you respond to things in your environment, whether that's a book, a painting, even like a lamp. Like if you see a lamp, do you like it? Do you hate it? And it's shaped by a lot of things, like it's shaped by our upbringing, by sociological factors, by stuff we see on Instagram.
I also think it has to do sometimes with like our experience of being in our bodies. Like the way you respond to a painting is like an embodied experience.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:10)
Is it a yuck or a yum?

**Sophie Haigney** (2:12)
Right. And like we talk about taste, taste is literally a word that originates from our thinking about our tongue. And so I think, I mean, AI is not embodied, whether or not you think it has consciousness that I don't, it certainly doesn't have a body. And so I wonder how you solve that problem of how you respond to stimuli in our environment if you're not responding really to stimuli.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:37)
Okay. So on one hand, taste is this last bastion of human judgment. But then recently, a number of startups have emerged promising to make AI more tasteful. There's this company called Taste Labs that raised more than $18 million in seed funding to quote, end AI slop.
They say they're using vetted human tastemakers to curate the datasets that AI is trained on. What do you think about efforts like this?

**Sophie Haigney** (3:10)
I mean, I think what it demonstrates is that there are people who really are noticing this problem, right? That AI is producing what we call slop, bad, ugly images, writing that's inelegant. It's clear that people are trying to solve that problem. And if the end result is that we get AI that produces higher quality design or better writing, that doesn't seem like, you know, that seems like a good thing to me on the whole.
I do think that's really different from taste, because if what they're doing is simply curating kind of quote-unquote better data sets or averaging different kinds of people's preferences, you're still in that problem of the average, and you're still not, I think, producing something that has its own taste, of course. You're just trying to inject a bit of what some set of people thinks is good taste into that equation, which I think you kind of end up in the same, it's a bit of a loop.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (4:15)
We'll be right back.

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