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Taste & AI

Taste is the ability to identify quality

Can an AI have Taste?

If taste is universal and objective then an AI should eventually be able to identify quality and therefore have taste.

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I'm not talking about aggregating human signals to understand what humans think quality is (Algorithmic Taste). For an AI to have taste it should be able to separate the novel from the boring independently.

Algorithmic taste involves humans, isn't that better?

Somewhere in the last 10 years we chose algorithms over human curation. Presumably for reasons of cost and scale.

Because of that choice, creators are forced to act like hamsters on a wheel. Posting endlessly with the right content for the algorithm.

Artists, musicians and filmmakers are forced to be entrepreneurs as much as they are craftspeople.

A Better Way to Discover

If it was possible to create an 'AI with Taste' it could review every song, image & video uploaded every day and highlight the interesting and mute the bland.

This would stop the treadmill of content creation that creators have to continually perform.

What would the internet look like if the incentive was quality instead of quality?

Addendum

It's possible that to curate for humans, you need more than an objective appreciation of quality. You may need more human qualities like a point of view about the world or a style derived from personal quirks and obsessions.

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