Comment by embedding-shape
4 hours ago
I think you don't get it :) I've written more about how I see it being here: https://emsh.cat/good-taste/
To repeat, I'm not worried. Making music might be easier than before, but having "Good Taste" isn't easier than before, it's still hard. And good stuff isn't just produced and made, they have decisions and choices behind them, and make the wrong ones, your thing ends up sucking.
If you just care about average content then yes, you can probably live on slop. But do you want to? Because no one is forcing you, there is still high quality stuff out there, produced by people with good taste, and it'll remain like that forever.
It's a good read, thanks for sharing. But the flaw in it, is the fact that you think that the world is built on merit, i.e. Good Taste, as you call it.
And while sure, merit / good taste are important, but if you look at the mainstream it's filled with average. Now, from the consumer side you can claim "what do you care about the mainstream, just look for good taste, and you will find it", and I agree with you. But I do not speak about the consumer side, but rather the producer side. As a producer, I want to produce "good taste", but if there is very little demand for good taste things, I might struggle to sustain myself while producing based on merit.
In the end, the reason enshittification exists, is because "good taste" stuff became too popular and the authors decided to capitalize on it (can't blame them when you have a mortgage to pay, and family to feed), and turn it into "mainstream crap".
I guess the point I'm trying to make, is that creating good taste is not easy. And it will become even harder as the mainstream will expand and capture AI generated content, leaving people who believe in creation based on merit, fighting for the crumbs.
The world is built at a balance between good taste and good economics. AI slop is still slop. Reminds me when there were massive booms on outsourcing software to low cost labor markets. Most of the software born out of those markets was slop and not much different than what we see today. Good taste still matters in most work. I am pretty big proponent of AI but I don’t think AI can write a book that I enjoy. Similarly I don’t believe AI can write software end to end without a humans input of good taste. Sure you can brute force it but like those early years of outsourcing I bet it won’t be maintainable or well running.
> But the flaw in it, is the fact that you think that the world is built on merit, i.e. Good Taste, as you call it.
That's not a fact, because I never said this, nor is it in the article. What from the article made you believe that I think that?
> but if there is very little demand for good taste things
There isn't, there is huge demand for good things, and it'll only get higher as more people attempt to just produce shit things.