Seonglae ChoBad taste is not knowing what you actually like, not even trying to feel it, and then speaking about someone else’s taste as if it were your own.
The author argues that “taste” discourse does not strengthen human agency. Instead, it risks fundamentally demoting it. Rather than defining humans as “discriminators” or “consumers” who merely select and curate outputs, the author emphasizes that humans should participate with intention at the very beginning of the generative process, like patrons or co-creators.
Drawing on historical examples such as the Renaissance Florentine bottega system, Michelangelo and Pope Julius II’s process of producing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the author shows that patronage was not a simple act of choosing. It was an intense negotiation among capital, labor, and transcendent value. The author also cites Tom Wolfe’s 1970s The Painted Word to criticize how modern art became reduced to illustrations of theory, and points out that recent Silicon Valley “taste” discourse can devolve into social display (sprezzatura) via symbolic objects like the Nakashima chair. As a technical warning, the author notes that in GANs (generative adversarial networks), the discriminator is a disposable component that can be removed once the generator becomes sufficiently advanced.
Against Taste
Taste arrived quietly, somewhere over the last few months.
https://minutes.substack.com/p/against-taste
Greg Brockman on Twitter / X
taste is a new core skill— Greg Brockman (@gdb) February 16, 2026
https://x.com/gdb/status/2023481258639286401