AI Needs Shame, Not Taste | Jacques Corby-Tuech

Contents

The most flattering answer in the room

Taste never stopped anyone

What shame is for

Being seen

But isn't this just guilt?

The cheaper virtue

You have seen the posts. The LinkedIn announcement that opens "In a world where", four hundred words long and not one of them the author's. The comment that thanks you for "this incredibly thoughtful piece" and then describes a piece you did not write. The company email so completely handed over to a machine, start to finish, that no human could have read it back without wincing, which is the tell, because plainly no human did. Bad work is not the part that gets to me. Bad work has always been with us. It is that nobody making it appears to feel a thing. Not a wince, not a flicker. Nobody gives a shit.

I spend my days in it. Most of my working life has gone on lifecycle marketing, so it reaches me by the hour: the forty-slide deck a colleague forwards having plainly written none of it, the Slack reply that took a machine to compose and no one to mean it, the brief that turns up with the placeholder text still in it. Whoever sent it felt nothing. I still do, which increasingly feels like my problem, not theirs.

There used to be a flinch. A small involuntary stop somewhere between making a thing and sending it, the moment you pictured the person on the receiving end and felt, before the thought had finished, that this was not good enough to put in front of them. It came faster than judgement and did its work while judgement was still clearing its throat. That is what has gone missing from the people filling the channels, who appear to have stopped feeling it.

And the industry, asked to name the human thing the machines still cannot manage, has reached for exactly the wrong word. The word everyone has settled on is taste.

The most flattering answer in the room

You can more or less date the consensus. In February Paul Graham told a couple of million followers that taste would only get more important as AI improved, because once anyone can make anything, the question that's left is what you choose to make. He linked an essay he'd written back in 2002. Two days later Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, followed with a tidier version: taste is a new core skill. From there it hardened into a genre. Taste is the moat. Taste is the last defensible advantage. Taste is the soul of the thing the clones can't copy. Search the phrase and you'll find a hundred variations, each one explaining that AI has driven the cost of competent execution to roughly nothing, so the only edge left is knowing what's worth making in the first place.

I understand why it caught on. It is the most flattering answer available. It takes the person hammering the generate button and recasts them as a curator, a discerning hand, a tastemaker picking from the machine's offerings like a buyer working a gallery wall. Suddenly everyone on LinkedIn can pat themselves on the back about how much taste they have, unlike, of course, everyone else. It only works as flattery if other people are short of the stuff, and it asks nothing of you beyond the conviction that you are not one of them, a conviction in generous supply. Best of all, it lets you carry on shipping at the new volume with a clear conscience. Taste is the one virtue you can award yourself while doing exactly what you were already doing, only faster and in greater quantity.

Taste never stopped anyone

Taste is real. Graham is right that it is not just a matter of opinion: get better at making things and your tastes shift, and your old preferences turn out not to have been merely different. They were worse. Good work has properties you can name and learn to see. It is a genuine skill, it sharpens with miles on the clock, and a person who has it can look at two things and be correct about which is the better one. Fine. Granted, all of it.

But what is taste even for? The work, and your relationship to the work. It answers two questions, is this any good and what should I make, and both of them run entirely between you and the thing on the screen. The person who eventually receives the thing never really enters into it, except as an abstraction, a market to be gratified. Taste is you, alone, marking your own bloody homework.

Which is exactly why it has never once stopped anyone doing the thing it is now being sold as the cure for. I have sat in the meeting where everyone round the table can see that the campaign is beneath us, can say out loud why it is cheap, and we ship it regardless, because the boss is carrying an AI mandate from upstairs, and stopping it was never taste's job. Taste tells you the slop is slop. It has not, in the entire history of the species, stopped a single person pressing send.

What shame is for

The faculty that did the governing was shame, which is awkward, because shame is the emotion we have spent the last couple of decades training ourselves to disown.

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