A Bad "Taste" In My Mouth

(repost from Substack: originally posted June 19th, 2025)

I personally reject the question “Will AI be able to do everything humans can do?”

This is a constant question posed in news publications and online articles. It evokes fear in the hearts of readers. They click on the link hoping its insights will definitively quiet that fear inside them. Or, will confirm the fear, thus validating their default cynicism. These articles create a vision of an AI future that we should just figure out how to fit into. And this is the question I reject: “Will AI be able to do everything humans can do?” because the subtext of the question is: if the answer is yes, then we are in danger of becoming irrelevant. It implies scarcity of demand for human skill. I reject the notion that we are meant to kill each other for the scraps that these AI companies throw to the masses. These tools are as valuable as consumers allow them to be. The AI preachers insist of the inevitability of our irrelevance, which takes from the individual and the collective whole, the agency to decide what does it mean to maintain human dignity.

I have never rejected the idea that with human ingenuity we could create a super-intelligent machine which surpasses the best of ourselves. And I do not reject that humans created the atomic bomb. I reject the necessity of inflicting it’s awesome horror on Nagasaki under the premise of inevitability. In that moment, we took a massive step back on the question of each individuals right to dignity in favor or showing the world just how quickly we can destroy what took lifetimes to create.

One of the ways that we give weight to the argument of inevitability is by buying into the notion that we should feel it is a good use of our intelligence and creativity, to create taste for the robots.

Aside from the articles asking if GenAI will surpass us are the ones that pose a different question: “what new jobs will AI create?” These jobs effectively amount to us being AI’s coaches. We are here to get the best out of this machine. With our “taste.”

Taste.

Taste: the buzzword of the moment. Silicon Valley’s answer to wanting to optimize everything for their technology, while still placating the masses so they are inclined to adopt it. Taste allows people to see themselves in the AI world - perhaps even prospering while the others fall behind. How quaint to use ones hands to make beauty from earth while the true civilization relocates to the superior digital world. Taste answers away: will these advancements come at the expense of our sense of humanness? To have taste implies an education being thoughtfully utilized.

Robert Capps recently wrote an article in the Times which concluded that humans three main roles in an AI economy will be: trust, integration and taste. The idea is that humans will serve as AI Auditors, Integrators, and Tastemakers. On taste he writes:

“It will remain a human’s job, of course, to tell the A.I. what to do. But telling A.I. what to do requires having a vision for exactly what you want. In a future where most of us have access to the same generative tools, taste will become incredibly important.”

My favorite piece of this statement is: “It will remain a human’s job, of course, to tell the A.I. what to do.”

The conceit it takes to write a whole article about how AI will soon surpass our talents and abilities, and then say it will of course remain in the hands of humans to direct these machines - is remarkable.

Almost every job mentioned in the article is effectively being a steward and implementor of the technology while it grows stronger, slowly enabling it to render those new jobs irrelevant in a matter of years, given its exponential pace of advancement.

Taste when uttered by the Silicon Valley elite misses what is fundamental about art. Art is when a human reaches into themselves and translates their discovery, through a craft, an idea, or something ineffable that then connects to the very soul of those who come into contact with their creation.

Nick Cave wrote an article in 2023 responding to a fan who sent in a song ChatGPT wrote in the style of Nick Cave. Cave says, “ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”

This is what is missing from the conversation. Cave acknowledges that, “ChatGPT could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.”

Watching a film, reading a novel, listening to a song - these things move me because they were born out of the reality of a human’s lived experience which connects to mine. It is the artists finite ability, that transcends the commonplace. Maybe other people will enjoy seeing AI performers, but for me that misses the point of art and why it matters.

This idea of taste over craft, implies that the “self-murder” as Cave calls it, is an economic weakness, when we are better utilized to refine what the AI creates.

But the craft is the being human. The craft is the rejection of the idea that because someone can come along and set a painting aflame, there is no worth learning how to hold a brush. It’s the rejection of the idea that just because an AI can replicate the sound of a violin, even a vibrato, that there is no valuable in picking up a bow.

It is the fragility of our creations which make them abundant. It is their limits which makes them infinite.

One day, I have no doubt, AI will be able to write this article just as effectively as I have, if not moreso. Perhaps I would be better off merely putting the finishing touches on. To display my “taste” as cultural value.

But I reject this premise. Because I want to read what humans have deigned to write, in spite of everything else they could have written - despite the odds being stacked against them. Because that is risk, that is the audacity that connects us to each other.

Living to perfect the machine is the audacity that tears our insides apart.