On Taste & Slop

29 Jun, 2026

Background music - Bones Shake by Hazlett

I think people hate AI derivatives too much today. Or well, people dont even know what they're hating. At one of my friend's club meetings, I heard someone say that only generative AI is bad; the rest is fine. I immediately exchanged looks with my friend to see whether I should engage in conversation with this presumably well-meaning person, only to be rewarded with a "please dont say anything; I need this club for my law school app".

But I digress.

I think that rather than being soulless, AI reflects exactly who we are right back at us, without any edits, and being forced to confront reality is an unpleasant, sobering reality that a lot of us feel uneasy about. Sure, it's averaged up, and there are some nonlinear transformations, but it's still us. I think what we conveniently like to forget is how for every one exceptional piece of human work there exist hundreds of thousands or a higher OOM of mediocre works. It's not like we're perfect after all! We like to wax eloquent about the Mozarts and Messis and how they transcend regular human capabilities, how artificial intelligence will never know what it feels like to be human, and thus never capture anything of meaning. And then we go crown it to be the winner of art competitions.

Walking on the streets of San Francisco is certainly an experience. Every morning, my legs scream internally while climbing the steep 45° incline on the way to the Parnassus Campus. I can't remember the last time someone didn't wait for me to cross the sidewalk first before they crossed in their cars, but it has happened at least once. To be honest, I like to let them pass first if they've been waiting before I get there. Only to be hit with the half-polite, half-resigned hand-wave of "nah, it's fine, you can go, I dont see myself getting out of here anytime soon," to which you must raise your hand up in an acknowledgement, "thanks and I hope you get on your way soon."

One evening when I was walking back home from work, I saw a Waymo slow down elegantly, wait for this other car and pedestrian to cross first, then ever so gently accelerate and go on its way. This isn't to say most other people wouldn't have done the same. It's more about the manner in which it did so. The gradual stop, the absence of a rush, the slow, assured acceleration once it was sure no one was in its line of sight. Personally, I always feel a little safer when I'm crossing the street, and I see a Waymo, for I know it'd rather shut itself off and screw over the passenger's ETA than run me over. It's as if it's learned all the best qualities of humans: no road rage, no swerving, no honking, just assuming the best from everyone else. How could you say that AI-generated outputs dont have value, when they seem to respect humans and human lives more than some other humans ever could? ¹