A startup's quixotic quest to fight AI slop
Taste Labs is a startup attempting to use AI to quantify and replicate human 'taste' in creative work. The company employs a network of 'Tastemakers' to train AI models on subjective quality, sparking a debate about the nature of human experience versus algorithmic pattern recognition.
Why it matters
This reflects the broader industry trend of attempting to automate creative and subjective processes, raising questions about the future of human-led artistic development.
Taste Labs CEO Thais Castello Branco wants to push creative work into an AI-powered future. Christie Hemm Klok for BI When I was a young lad spending too much time on the internet, I was obsessed with fonts. I read blog posts on sites like Typographica about the finer points of kerning. I read white papers from Microsoft about the readability of Calibri compared to Arial. I copied and pasted hundreds of pages' worth of books and essays from Project Gutenberg into Microsoft Word and formatted them to my liking. Among them was a theory of great fiction and taste by Henry James , published in 1884, which I later recast in Cambria and printed out so I could read it on the bus. James believed that greatness could be defined by its elements, but that taste comes from experience.
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