aguesia

when taste justifies theft

I
The Roots of Taste

Sight informs touch to anticipate softness when we see a furry surface. The olfactory braids with the gustatory—sometimes tightly enough that aromas are perceived by the tongue. The cohabitation of the senses in the body results in a diplomacy so coherent the absence of one is said to lead to the heightening of others.

One sense has expanded past its border. Thomas Kaminski describes taste as “the faculty by which we make judgments about art¹” — its fixture as a metaphor for aesthetic sensibility was explored by 18th century philosophers who’d pen sprawling diss-ertations and hype up their theories as Michael R. Spicher summarises:

“For David Hume, taste is a subjective feeling with a standard found within the beholders. For Alexander Gerard, taste is an act of the imagination. For Immanuel Kant, taste is subjective, but beautiful objects present themselves as having universal appeal.²”

Immanuel Kant is considered one of the most influential moral thinkers in western thought. He and Hume were also profoundly racist. Mentioning the latter does not liquidate the reality of the former but it does sober the context.

“The very notion of taste contains within itself two ideas in constant tension. First, taste is always personal: a judgment, but one’s own judgment… And yet, however much we have a right to our own likes and dislikes, such judgments are often measured against a standard. These two principles—the autonomy of the individual taste and the existence of some broader principle of excellence—are perpetually at odds.” —Thomas Kaminski

The tug-of-war between subjective affinity and objective standard is complicated by the fact that aesthetic standards were largely defined by an era of imperial expansion, aristocratic elitism and patriarchal catholicism. When Akala states, “I can't say Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time. I don’t read Arabic, I don’t read Mandarin, I don’t read Swahili” it’s because despite being held as the literary standard, the ubiquity of Shakespeare’s greatness has been heavily dependent on imposing Anglo-European culture on the rest of the world.

How does Kant’s musings on taste change in the light when you consider his xenophobic ignorance lead him to believe “negroes are the lowest of all of the American races³”? What does it mean that Hume believed taste to be governed by a standard found in the beholder when he beheld it “apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites”?⁴

If the olfactory can influence the gustatory in the same body—doesn’t it stand to reason the prejudicial influences the philosophical?

II
What is that smell?

There’s an odour—foul enough to shrivel tastebuds, pungent enough to stir the guts.

Is this what the end of the world smells like?

Many believe the scent of apocalypse wafted into the airways with the detonation of the atomic bomb, where an uncloseable hell-mouth was pried open by patriotic warmongers and advanced nuclear physics. Others look back further to the smog of the industrial revolution.

My crack-pot theory has more banality in its evil than the soot of the combustion engine or a radioactive holocaust’s ectoplasmic glow.

To me, humanity’s fate was sealed with the production of plastic—a functionally immortal nuisance that defies the natural laws of decay, stubbornly refusing to give itself back to the worms, trees or mycelium. It seems “progress” always places nature on a slab for ritual sacrifice. Plastic is one of our most profound trespasses. And we yearn to be just like it.

When compared to silicon-based neural networks, a Nobel Prize winning scientist calls the neuroplasticity of the brain a “sloppy system”.

Michel Foucault might speculate this cavalier attitude towards human intellect in the face of artificial intelligence’s infancy originates from “the 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, [but] also invented the disciplines.⁵”

He believed the disciplines to be formulas of domination, “policies of coercion” formulated to “increase the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminish these same forces (in political terms of obedience).”

Is it not the conditioning of “the disciplines” that compel us to marvel at the efficiency of computers while we scoff at the “sloppiness” of a human mind so complex that it can’t even fully comprehend itself?

ChatGPT can churn out academic essays with made-up resources in seconds but it can’t cook a meal or do maths. AlphaGo can defeat a world champion of an ancient game but it can’t articulate the joy of winning in a press conference. The innovation of these technologies are far less impressive when you realise they’ve been flooded with resources to superhumanly master one thing and, in the case of endeavours like live subtitle captioning, they don’t even do them very well.

“Yet.”

We are assured Large Language Models can only improve while studies show a linguistic and cognitive decline of the users who rely on them. They’ve mounted the conveyor belt of “progress”, mistaking their ennui and fear of being left behind for hope and opportunity and in their embrace of AI, their critical thinking skills deteriorate. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I imagine Martin Niemöller would look at this crossroads and say, “First they came for the artists…”

Contrary to my gauche allusion to German fascism, I don’t hate Generative AI. I hate that—like western civilisation itself—it has established its superiority through theft. I hate how devastating its environmental impacts are. I am wary of its unpredictability and I hate the growing number of the atrocities it’s being used for. The existential risk of AGI becoming “misaligned” to humanity doesn’t concern me as much as a Super-intelligence aligned to the whims of the current world elite.

More than anything to do with AI itself, I hate how people are unable assess its place in the threats we’re collectively facing. Artificial Intelligence is advancing parallel to a politically spooky world. In 2013,

Edward Snowden

blew the whistle on the NSA’s illegal mass surveillance programs to global uproar. A decade later, we surrender our data on a daily basis with every cookie acceptance and the omnipresence of smartphones has made the offline world into a panopticon for the digital realm. We surveil each other—dishing out ridicule or aggressively self-policing out of fear that our humiliation will be etched in viral marble forever. The enforcement of the 2023 UK Online Safety Act has meant official identification is now required to access explicit websites, which hasn’t just affected pornography sites, as sites with explicit sections like Reddit now require images of your passport or driver’s license under the guise of child protection. The police force are using advanced surveillance state apparatus in South London under the guise of quelling gang crime. Social services are being strategically under-funded to allow corporations more power than ever. Western nations have been overlooking a genocide and the citizen’s principled protest have been met with criminalisation and detainment. Our governments are doing everything but making our lives better, nothing is fucking working and we’re so overwhelmed by the sheer monstrosity of it all that it’s been conditioning us to not care about anything but ourselves.

As a result, capitalistic individualism has deceived us into believing the advancement of AI will remedy—not exacerbate—any of this. The embrace of AI relies on the belief we have something a machine can never have.

Perhaps the odour scraping softly on the tongue is denial.

III
The atrophy of taste

“In an age where AI can make anything, taste matters more than ever.”

If the vibe of this phrase feels familiar, it’s because there’s a creepy number of think-pieces with this same premise. As of writing—I count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and, of course, 7.

Matteo Azzolini⁶ and Stepfanie Tyler begin with the exact same announcement:

“We are drowning in content.”

Tyler’s text shares stark similarities with Elliot Vredenburg’s Why Taste Matters Now More Than Ever—which was published a day before her own and is by far the most compelling and well-researched essay in this emergent genre. She admits to using AI assistance in her “writing” but never confirms the nature of the assistance. The complicity in theft by using AI to “assist” your essay is one thing—but to actively feed aspects of other, published writers into ChatGPT is, put kindly, a tasteless contribution to the reservoir of “content” she claims we’re all drowning in.

If “taste is the new intelligence⁷” — Tyler’s methods betray her own premise.

It is difficult to grasp whether the eerie regurgitation of think-pieces are independent arrivals at the same unoriginal conclusion or gross displays of faux-deep incest.

By positioning taste as some final bastion of humanity, these manifestos podium human discernment to run interference for AI’s expansion into art. The claim “we’re drowning in content”, for instance, sets the scene for two objectives:

1. Reinforce the flattening art (expressive, structure-challenging, time-liberated, communal) into content (structure-appeasing, market-based, time-constricted, mass-produceable, parasocial).

2. Once everything creative is established as “content” — claim the over-saturation means nothing is worth creating anyway.

This is how “progress” is facilitated—devalued production and maximised output. These AI “writers” believe themselves to be curators descending from a proud lineage of taste-making when they’re more akin to Wall Street traders; betting on the imaginative fatigue of the populous, ceding the production of creativity to machines because the actual practice of making art is too tedious and economically inefficient. Instead, they hydraulic-press all creativity into the manageable currency of “content” so they can shuffle it around as data on the viral stock market for their own gain.

They don’t want to be writers. They want to be recognised as writers so they may leverage the engagement into financial capital.⁸

“You don’t care about art. You care about hierarchy. You want permission to feel superior to people who create faster than you. The fact that my work—AI-assisted or not—reached more people than yours ever will, bothers you. So you rationalize it as ‘fraudulence’
even though, deep down, you know it’s resonance” — Stepfanie Tyler

It’s trippy watching someone preach about the need for discernment when discernment is needed of them. Maybe that doesn’t make Tyler a hypocrite but rather a perfect avatar for her own message.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell

The event that spurred me to confront Tyler was witnessing a prominent Black curator repost her “essay”. The second-hand embarrassment of watching otherwise astute thinkers celebrate vapidly constructed plagiarism is the main thing that bothers me about its massive reach. I’m reminded of a quote by critic Paul Fussell:

What's the difference between bad and BAD? Bad is something like dog-do on the sidewalk, or a failing grade, or a case of scarlet fever—something no one ever said was good. BAD is different. It is something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or fascinating. For a thing to be really BAD, it must exhibit elements of the pretentious, the overwrought, or the fraudulent. Bathroom faucet handles that cut your fingers are bad. If gold-plated, they are BAD. Dismal food is bad. Dismal food pretentiously served in a restaurant associated with the word gourmet is BAD. Being alert to this distinction is a large part of the fun of being alive today, in a moment teeming with raucously overvalued emptiness and trash.⁹

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Tyler and her contemporaries are right—we are drowning in content. There’s no remedy in adding to the slop-bucket and trying to pass it off as “taste”.

Abundance is just a symptom. The problem is malnutrition.

We don’t really care where our content comes from; any more than we care about what farm the cow in the polyethylene-wrapped beef sirloin came from in the supermarket or where the wealth that guarantees our western comforts comes from or how ChatGPT acquired the literature it was trained from.

We care how things look, how they’re presented and/or packaged but not how they are. Not how they sustain us, how they can transform us, how they make us feel. The modern pace has quickened to a speed where caring is easily swiped away. Some may say this lack of care as fundamentally antithetical to taste. Others might point out it’s in line with the with the negligent paradigms embedded by Hume and Kant.

Taste requires principled acquisition—ideally from sustained, active exposure to an art-form that is contextually informed and structurally examined. The art itself must be met with curiosity, neutrality or optimism and an equal interrogation of one’s subjective distaste (lest we be guided by prejudices we haven’t reckoned with).

The vice-grip of late-stage capitalism means most people don’t have the time, energy or privilege to give art such due diligence. They have no time to savour. Music, literature, movies, social media; all condense into arenas of escape. These are the conditions that have brought about the great glazing of the tastemakers—a time-honoured tradition of celebrating those who do have the means so they may help shepherd the masses to bespoke Pinterest boards of minimally arranged furniture and well-selected Spotify playlist.

The phantom allusion of these pieces is that you, my dear reader, can become a tastemaker just like Rick Rubin! You just gotta be more “vibe-driven”. Situational/economic disparities be damned. In reality, they are appealing to the little corner of your mind that wants your passive exposure to the internet—this chaotic archive of all human knowledge at our fingertips—to feel like useful consumption.

We yearn for our doom-scrolling to feel productive.

Tyler and I know this intimately, which is why we both understand that the sycophantic onslaught of AI-prompted banalities she refers to as an “essay” will get more traction than anything I’ll likely ever pen on Substack—because it validates the need to not try. But, my dear reader, I will always implore you to try because the acquisition of anything worthwhile—including taste—requires more effort than appealing to the lowest common denominator. It is not convenient, profitable or economically efficient to cut through the easily-chuggable AI content and the vapid flavours that have readied us for the coming avalanche of reheated nacho-paste. But it is necessary, and despite speaking about AI enthusiasts with level of hostility that could quite easily be seen as tasteless, I hope you recognise my offerings beyond the entryway of taste. As

Charlotte Simmons

rightfully points out—perhaps none of this is about taste at all. Perhaps it is a matter of nutrition and, by focusing on taste alone, we are missing the fact that every problem uttered in this essay is a problem of malnourishment.

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One striking thing about this country above all others is the omnipotence of "presentation." A thing that is palpably bad doesn't stay bad very long before someone praises it and thus elevates it to BAD, and soon it is celebrated everywhere as highly desirable. It's as if Americans were so insecure, so timid about relying on their own decent tastes and instincts, that they welcome every possible guru to instruct them about what is good (that is, BAD) and to encourage them to embrace it. — Paul Fussell

1. Thomas Kaminski, (2021) — On Taste

2. Michael R. Spicher, (2015) — Aesthetic Taste

3. Immanuel Kant, (1802) — Physical Geography

4. David Hume, (1777) — Of National Characters

5. Michel Foucault, (1977) — Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison

6. Sidenote: Azzolini’s piece was published after Tyler’s and is, again, similar in places.
I didn’t have the bandwidth to explore my position on plagiarising plagiarisers.

7. “Taste is the new intelligence” = “Classism is the new Racism” = “Woman is the nigger of the world”

8. A recommended read: Roald Dahl, (1954) — The Great Automatic Grammatiser, 1954

9. Paul Fussell, (1992) – BAD, or, The dumbing of America