What is Taste?
Taste is one of things that is hard to define and a quality everyone defines differently.
My definition of taste: a compressed, internalized and instinctive judgment, based on failure, learned over time, from deep experience. Taste is not measurable directly. You will never see a taste metric.
The act of exercising taste is saying NO. A lot. Copy that doesn’t quite really work, ugly code, design that looks ok but feels off, messaging that sounds right but doesn’t quite hit the mark.
To properly train an AI model, you need to train it on the good and bad and label it as such. When feeding AI source material, people almost never feed it the failures and definitely don’t provide context around why they were failures.
I’m sure there are some feeding models the failures when providing source materials for AI, but it’s rarely done. Most are saying a version of “here are my successful campaigns, make me more.” AI generates the campaigns, you look at it and say good enough, and push it out the door. Anyone who has done anything creative with AI knows often it can be somewhat right, directionally right, and almost right, but never bullseye.
Say you push it out, it performs ok, you feed it back into the AI as a successful campaign. Then you generate more campaigns, those are almost right too, but not exactly. You push it out and reinforce the “slightly off” process over and over, each campaign being a bit more slightly off each time. And then at some point, you realize it’s all off. There was no one deviation that made it all crap.
It’s a slippery slope of minor slop that piles up smelling like a slurry pit.
If you don’t have someone with taste evaluating the AI-generated output and saying no often, you’ll end up in the pit eventually.
Indeed, how do you measure compounded “slightly off” executions?
On the flipside, you can’t tell the harm that good taste prevented. No one measures what a bad redesigned logo would have cost in revenue. How do you measure holding off the launch of a campaign that is culturally tone deaf?
You see this struggle with technical founder-led companies and projects led by engineers. You can’t write a unit test for taste, what is good, what is bad. Then you end up with copy that is mishmash of mind numbing jargon, instead of “Built in Rust, deployed on Kubernetes, end-to-end encrypted” when the costumer only needed to hear “your invoices go out on time.”