Not Even Taste Would Be Left (Probably)
Not Even Taste Would Be Left (Probably)
As a proper PRC Chinese1 I do follow Chinese online politics discourse, and years ago there's this thing called the 入关学 Ru Guan Xue, which was a pop theory in which PRC will eventually rise and invade and occupy the corrupt and fallen West like how the Jurchen people penetrated the Shanhai Pass, invaded the declining Ming empire and established the Qing Dynasty. This is, of course, nothing but mad people's babbling at this point, but one of the phrases its believers stayed in my head till this day: 自有大儒为我辩经, which roughly translates to "there will be Confucian scholars going through the classic texts to justify (our actions)". It's a common trope about Confucian scholars in Chinese history that a lot of them always follow the new ruler whenever a dynasty falls and come up with reasons to justify their opportunistic behaviour/nature, e.g. things like "the last emperor has lost his Mandate of Heaven which was given to our new overlord" or something2; and because this would eventually happen, the idea was that we don't have to justify actions and we can use whatever dirty tricks we like, because there would be people making excuses for us eventually.
If you don't understand why I'm talking about some random niche political stuff for this long of a paragraph, let me put it this way:
We don't have to justify our judgement as "taste"; we can sink however low and become however bad as we want, because people would accept what they have as they become the norm, and what we're doing - no matter how dogshit it is - will inevitably become "taste" eventually.
The "Ru Guan Xue" of those fanatics might be stupid crazy talk, but the "Ru Guan Xue" of AI might very well not be, at least nowadays I found it very hard to say it is. It's not like we never had this "slop vs. anti-slop" dynamics before AI; remember how we used to say Electron is not "real native"?3 Some people did complain and some people do till this day, but you do have to notice that there's a lot of people that's like "eh I don't really like this but if I really have to use it it could be fine I guess :|"
Of course I'm not a supporter of this gradual degradation and the normalization of it; I'm simply a very pessimistic person and I think this degradation would happen (and probably already did). It's just somewhat amusing and annoying at the same time that so many people are saying things like "the most important skill in this era is taste" and "taste is all that's left"; it's stupid because these claims assumes a lot of things that are never promised to be true, including and not limited to them actually knowing what "taste" is and them actually having such things… Not to mention that this is an industry in which, weirdly, everyone claims they care about "taste" when they're competing with each other but hardly anyone is getting rewarded for it, let alone people that are willing to reward others for such a thing. People seems to not know that "taste" requires people to care about separating what's "good" from what's bad, and generative AIs are the ultimate care-eliminating machines. In this era where you could (and are expected) to prompt your way to presentable pieces of software even if it means creating a thousand billion footguns in the mean time - lip services doesn't count because you can always fake them and never commit - does it really make sense to believe that people actually don't know that you're pretending that you suddenly care about the things that you've never cared up till now?…
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Last update: 2026.8.14
Footnotes:
Instead of {place-outside-of-china} Chinese (or "diaspora Chinese" or some other fancy words) which are just {people-from-place-outside-of-china}. Especially American Chinese, and especially the 2nd/3rd-gen immigrant ones. Other people might claim these people Chinese, but I absolutely don't.
We have a history of just individuals but not really a history of justice, which is in my opinion at the very least a shame.
It still isn't, but you get the point.