ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“AI taste refers to the aesthetic and qualitative judgments that AI systems make when generating or evaluating content-essentially, the ‘style’ or ‘sensibility’ reflected in an AI’s outputs.” – AI taste

AI taste refers to the aesthetic and qualitative judgments that AI systems make when generating or evaluating content-essentially, the ‘style’ or ‘sensibility’ reflected in an AI’s outputs. This concept captures how AI models develop a form of discernment or preference in creative domains, such as art, writing, or design, often inferred from training data patterns rather than true subjective experience. Unlike human taste, which is shaped by embodied experiences like cultural exposure and personal failures, AI taste emerges from statistical correlations in vast datasets, enabling systems to mimic stylistic choices but lacking genuine sentience or intuition.

Key Characteristics of AI Taste

• Pattern-Based Evaluation: AI assesses content by proxy metrics derived from user interactions, such as recommendations in music or movies, where systems like Spotify predict preferences through collaborative filtering rather than intrinsic understanding.
• Limitations in Subjectivity: Machines excel at scalable proxies for taste in digitised domains (e.g., music) but struggle with sensory or highly subjective areas like wine tasting, requiring extensive human-labelled data to map chemical properties to descriptors like ‘oaky’ or ‘fruity’.
• Emerging Sensory Applications: Advances like electronic tongues integrate AI to classify liquids (e.g., milk variants, spoiled juices) with over 80% accuracy by mimicking the human gustatory cortex via neural networks, revealing AI’s ‘inner thoughts’ in decision-making.
• Human-AI Synergy: As AI improves, human taste becomes crucial as the ‘editor’ layer, providing embodied judgement to refine outputs, discern cultural nuances, and avoid pitfalls like solving the wrong problem.

Challenges and Future Implications

Current AI lacks true preferences due to its disembodied nature, relying on data-driven predictions that can falter in nuanced contexts. In creative fields, AI taste manifests as stylistic biases from training data, raising questions about authenticity. Yet, it offers competitive edges in content generation, where ‘good taste’ involves selecting resonant signals amid hype. Future developments may bridge this gap through multimodal training, enhancing AI’s qualitative sensibility.

Key Theorist: Ian Goodfellow

Ian Goodfellow, often credited as a foundational thinker whose work underpins modern AI taste, is a pioneering researcher in generative models. Born in 1987, Goodfellow earned his PhD from the University of Montreal in 2014 under Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner. While working at Google Brain in 2014, he invented Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a breakthrough architecture where two neural networks-a generator and a discriminator-compete to produce realistic outputs.

Goodfellow’s relationship to AI taste stems from GANs’ ability to capture and replicate aesthetic distributions from data. GANs train the generator to produce content (e.g., art, faces) that fools the discriminator into deeming it authentic, effectively encoding a model’s ‘taste’ for realism and style. This adversarial process mirrors human aesthetic judgement, enabling AI to generate images rivaling human artists, as seen in applications like StyleGAN for photorealistic portraits. His work laid the groundwork for diffusion models (e.g., DALL-E, Stable Diffusion), which dominate contemporary AI content generation and embody ‘AI taste’ by synthesising visually coherent, stylistically nuanced outputs.

After Google, Goodfellow joined OpenAI, then Apple (focusing on privacy-preserving AI), and later DeepMind. His contributions extend to security research, like evasion attacks on neural networks. Goodfellow’s emphasis on generative fidelity has profoundly shaped how AI develops qualitative ‘sensibility’, making him the preeminent theorist linking machine learning to aesthetic judgement.