AI's taste test
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AI makers say the newest models are smart, funny, empathetic, self-reflective and now also "tasteful."
Why it matters: Some AI optimists and some AI critics — who agree on very little — argue that taste is one of the many uniquely human traits that can't be taught to a machine.
Driving the news: Anthropic says its newest model — Opus 4.7 — is "more tasteful and creative when completing professional tasks, producing higher-quality interfaces, slides, and docs."
- "We mean its outputs align better with what an experienced practitioner in that domain would consider great work," an Anthropic spokesperson tells Axios.
How it works: Taste, here, doesn't mean Claude can tell you the pesto needs more garlic. It means aesthetic judgment and creative polish on work outputs.
State of play: Silicon Valley insiders love to talk about "taste," as Kyle Chayka reported in The New Yorker last month.
- Taste is both the thing that separates humans from the bots and the thing that many humans want the bots to have so that the work it creates doesn't look like slop.
Anthropic isn't the only AI company working on taste. Consumer tech firm Patron Fund says it's building AI agents trained to exhibit aesthetic judgment and cultural fluency.
- "Taste is shaped by accumulated experiences that inform perspective," Jason Yeh, co-founder at Patron told Axios.
- One agent named "Daisy" follows fashion week, plays golf and loves K-Pop.
- "The goal is to have them build taste the same way humans do," Yeh says.
Zoom in: Sometimes taste means being "hip" or "cool" or whatever new word means the same thing. If AI ever had a coolness factor, it's worn off by now.
- Your boss loves it, but your teenage children have begun to ruthlessly mock it. In a teens vs. bosses coolness contest, teens win.
- But work isn't a coolness contest.
The other side: Even some of the biggest AI bosses of them all — Marc Andreessen for example — say AI doesn't have taste. By that he means that it can't yet discern which are the best companies to invest in.
- Therefore AI could potentially replace everyone else. But not him.
Taste is picking winners, but it's also knowing what you like when it comes to art, literature, music or anything else.
- Critics use "slop" as shorthand for AI-generated content, arguing that anyone with taste wouldn't like it. Others disagree.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was famously skewered on X for being "really struck" by a metafiction story written by a model that the company trained to be "good at creative writing."
- Meanwhile, AI-generated music continues to top the charts.
Taste is complicated. The word itself has lost all meaning, Homebrew partner Hunter Walk, tells Axios.
- It's just another one of the buzzwords "rocketing around the tech thought influencer and VC content marketing ecosystem," Walk says.
- "Many of the folks throwing around the word 'taste' today are just trying to signal hipness," he says.
The intrigue: Newer models generate fewer of the tells that have come to symbolize AI tastelessness, Ethan Smith, CEO of digital marketing agency Graphite says.
- Those include the "it's not X, it's Y" construction, the sheen of AI-generated images and the ultra-popular purple website.
- Based on research the firm has coming out next month, models have reduced the number of em dashes.
What we're watching: Whether AI models start creating more of what humans prefer or whether humans start preferring more of what AI models create.
