Taste and Smell

In the age of AI, what matters now more than ever seems to be having a good taste and ability to smell.

Ira Glass captured the universal frustration of anyone who works in creative work, from arts to science:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Because skills necessary for excellence are harder to master than acquiring good tastes, the education and training is almost entirely focused on skill acquisition. Lots of advices on “do what you excel rather than do what you love” or “So good they can’t ignore you” are all along this line of thought that skills are what propel you to the excellent positions and good jobs.

However, AI is flipping this script. Being able to produce a highly stylistic illustration has always been a very difficult skill to acquire (TK move. hyperrealistic drawing skills -> photographs). Now, you just need a good prompt and few minutes to generate an image that is hard to distinguish from an actual photo.

Just write a few prompt and within a few seconds, your LLM can generate the most polished, perfectly grammatically correct treatise on a obscure philosophical concepts.

But, the problem is that there’s infinite possibility of those quickly generated outputs. If you ask slightly differently, it will produce a different product. You can also iteratively change what you get drastically.

Now the difficulty is the choice and being able to discern what’s good from what’s bad. Does this writing or image good enough? Which one of these options are the best? Which part is not good and how should I change?

In other words, now more than ever your taste matters. With the same amazingly powerful tools, one can produce a total AI slop with full of bullshits while another producing a masterpiece.

Do you have a killer taste?

How about programming? You can vibe-code amazing things. No one can really deny the power of coding agents. But these seemingly infinite power still needs human directions and interventions. Here, what becomes the most crucial?

Of course your ability to smell bad design or code, as well as taste to appreciate good architecture and erase absurd logic or over-engineering.

How can we learn to smell? How do we develop a killer taste?

I think this question may be informative for thinking about the future of education.

Lots of input.

For certain domains, doing the hard exercise for skill development without using AI may still be necessary.

For other domains, we may need to think more about the combination of “what makes it great” approach and traditional skill development. A lot of skills that we learn right now may become more of “crafts” that only a much smaller number of people learn and practice for the joy and rarity value of the skills.