The Automation of Taste
How do we judge beauty, music, fashion, and art, and how do we develop those preferences? Taste is deeply human. What a person likes can tell you everything you need to know about them, after all, taste is shaped by personal experiences, the environment we grew up in, and our personal intuition. It’s what we find interesting or meaningful or worth our attention.
But how personal is our taste?
Take a look at your world.
The movies you watch? Algorithmically recommended.
The music you listen to? Picked by AI-generated playlists.
The art you see? Curated by social media engagement metrics.
The news you read? Optimized for clicks, not depth.
Our choices feel personal, but they’re not. They’re predicted, nudged, and automated.
It used to be that discovering new art meant stumbling upon an obscure painting in a tucked-away gallery. Finding new music meant digging through record stores. Developing taste required effort, it happened by serendipity when curiosity meets patience.
Now, discovery is frictionless. With AI algorithms getting better every day from repeated use, it serves up exactly what we’re most likely to enjoy, refined through billions of data points. And at first, that sounds like an improvement. Until you realize that effortless discovery also means effortless homogeneity. We are all regressing to the mean, trading our individuality for efficiency.
Because when the machine decides what we see, we stop deciding for ourselves.
But taste isn’t just about what we like; it’s about 'why' we like these things and how we have come to like them. It’s shaped by our experiences, our culture and exposure to new ideas. It evolves when we challenge ourselves, explore unfamiliar things, and engage deeply with art and creativity.
The problem is, when AI curates everything we consume, i.e. our music, movies, books, fashion, and even art. It doesn’t just reflect our taste. It shapes it. AI doesn’t challenge us; it optimizes for what we already like, creating a feedback loop that narrows our exposure instead of expanding it.
That’s why the real question isn’t just "Is AI automating taste?" but "Is AI making our taste more predictable, less personal, and ultimately, less human?"
When everything is fine-tuned to our existing preferences, taste stops evolving. We don’t challenge ourselves. We don’t explore outside our comfort zones. We become passive consumers of a feed that’s tailored to keep us scrolling, and not to make us think.
If we don’t want AI to flatten our sense of beauty into a set of algorithmic probabilities, we need to start thinking differently.
We’re living in an era where AI is shaping our taste, preferences and meaning. And if we’re not careful, we might wake up one day realizing we don’t actually know what we like anymore.
So the question is: Are we still choosing, or are we just consuming?
And more importantly—what are we going to do about it?
Sonam Pelden
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