What Is Taste, Really?

In his first piece for Every, Jack Cheng explored creativity. Now he’s tackling another ubiquitous word in AI discourse: taste. But as he points out, we’re often conflating two very different things when we use it, and understanding how these two interact is crucial if taste is really going to be our edge in an AI-augmented world. From his early days at a SoHo ad agency to Steve Jobs debating laundry machines at family dinners, Jack shows how taste is built through making things and learning to articulate why you like what you like.—Kate Lee

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A couple of months ago, my one-year-old son learned the words “yeah” and “no.”

Since then, he’s started to express his preferences: for his green garden vegetable bib over his blue space bib, for fire trucks (or as he calls them, “wee-ooh-wee-oohs”) over other vehicles. He’s still fickle—one day he’ll want his sloth stuffie, another his dog one—but he’s very much on his way to developing his taste.

Taste. As AI tools grow more capable, I keep bumping into this word. Now that these tools can handle much of the execution work, we’re told, now that you can do pretty much anything without prior limitations of skill or experience, taste is the moat, the secret sauce, the difference-maker. “Just add taste.”

But when you encounter “taste” in the wild, you might get definitions as varied as the source. It is a “contentious term of frustrating ambiguity,” per fashion and culture writer W. David Marx.

Investor and designer Willem Van Lancker says taste is a product of friction, earned through making and repeated discernment. Spiral, Every’s AI writing product, is pitched as “your AI writing assistant with taste.” Last year’s Financial Times holiday gift guide quipped, “On the whole, children have lamentably bad taste and are happy with any bit of garish plastic that you care to throw at them,” which I can attest is true.

To me, part of the confusion stems from the fact that when we talk about taste, we’re talking about two different forms of it: 1) personal taste and 2) what is considered tasteful or “in good taste.” The two might overlap considerably, but if taste is going to be our edge in this era of AI, we need to first understand how they interact before we can effectively hone that edge.

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A tale of two tastes

My first job out of college was at an ad agency in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Picture a sheltered, pimply teenager from the suburban Midwest transplanted into the world’s hotbed of fashion and media tastemakers. I was exhilarated. I was also way out of my league.

The agency’s loft office had two long rows of desks with Apple Cinema Displays, at a time when the device maker wasn’t widely used outside of creative fields. Mid- and senior-level graphic designers sat at those desks, beautifying product packaging in Adobe Illustrator, dressed in clothes from brands I didn’t recognize from my local mall back home. Some of those designers became my first friends in the city. Their apartments were filled with mid-century furniture, carefully thrifted ceramics, and eclectic—yet serenely arranged—wall art.

They had taste, and I desperately wanted to have it too. I spent my first paychecks on clothing from various SoHo menswear shops and a shiny new MacBook Pro—my first Apple computer. My friend Gino and I opened it in the office, cooing in awe of the pearlescent packaging.

Your aggregate self

From this story, you can see both personal taste and tastefulness interacting. The first, personal taste—or very simply, a sense of what you like and don’t like—comes through accumulated experience.

My job put me in contact with unfamiliar fashion, art, furniture, and technology products that I could compare against what I’d known before. Some of those choices stuck; others I shed not long after I left. Slowly, I built up my preferences and ultimately, my sense of self.

A strong sense of personal taste—and thus a strong sense of self—is a potent filter. When there is an overwhelming array of things to choose from, it operates as an instinct, quickly reducing the number of choices. What’s “not me” is immediately discarded, leaving you to evaluate the rest for what is you. This filter becomes even more necessary as AI opens up choices previously locked behind the doors of time, labor, and technical ability.

Personal taste is also a homing beacon. It helps you find others with similar tastes, and helps them find you. Journalist and culture critic Kyle Chayka writes in his book Filterworld that taste “is a word for how we measure culture and judge our relationship to it. If something suits our taste, we feel close to it and identify with it, as well as form relationships with other people based on it.”

Which leads us to our second form of taste: “good” taste.

Good taste is cultural

My trying to fit in among my new work colleagues was also about recognizing that they had good taste. This second definition of taste is much slipperier, because it’s cultural. Just as individual persons can have their own likes and dislikes, so can groups of people.

Good taste looks different in different cultures, different social groups: In engineering, good taste might be a preference for clean, elegant code, or for elegant coding languages like Ruby. Good taste in film might mean a preference for well-respected, less-mainstream directors like Yashujiro Ozu and Whit Stillman, for foreign cinema on the streaming service Mubi and titles in the Criterion Collection.

To W. David Marx, this cultural sense of taste is also bound up in status. Maybe I saw the agency’s designers as having good taste because they were higher up in the organization than me, a junior creative. My mimicry was an attempt to both understand their constellation of choices and claim some of the implied status for myself.

Part of this cultural definition unlocked for me through talking with Eleanor Warnock, Every’s managing editor. When I asked her for examples of people whom she considered to have good taste, one person she cited was actor and model Julia Fox, whose fearless attitude and mixing of avant-garde and DIY aesthetics spurred a resurgence of Y2K fashion. “She has really good taste for what’s on the money, what is memorable and what is punchy, and a real taste for fashion and drama.” Eleanor said, and then added: “But I don’t agree with her taste.”

To put it into our framework: Even though their personal tastes don’t align, Eleanor recognizes that Fox has a distinct sense of taste that, combined with Fox’s celebrity status, is one that larger groups of people want to emulate—and is therefore considered “good taste.” Fox’s personal taste helps define the broader cultural taste from within, like an oboe against which the rest of the orchestra tunes its instruments. She is, in other words, a tastemaker.

The work of discernment

When people talk about the importance of cultivating taste, or discernment, I take it to mean that in order to differentiate yourself as someone with good taste, or as a tastemaker, you first have to have a clear sense of personal taste. Part of that is accumulating experience—training data, if you will. But how you go about those experiences also counts...

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