But where does taste come from?

但“品味”究竟从何而来？

By Christine Lemmer-Webber on Sun 30 August 2026 作者：Christine Lemmer-Webber，2026年8月30日（周日）

Another day, another blogpost reflecting on “taste”. It’s not a bad post, but there are a billion of these now, and the irony of that is that this has tended to leave them fairly tasteless and bland for me. 又是一天，又一篇反思“品味”的博文。文章本身不算差，但现在这类文章多如牛毛，讽刺的是，这反而让我觉得它们相当乏味且平庸。

We’ve probably all seen the Rick Rubin meme by now. Or maybe even better, the parody of the trend. People are afraid they can’t do useful things anymore, because AI can do them better, so they hope they have some sort of edge over it with taste. 我们大概都看过关于 Rick Rubin 的梗图了，或者更好一点，看过对这种趋势的恶搞。人们担心自己无法再做出有用的东西，因为 AI 可以做得更好，所以他们寄希望于通过“品味”来获得某种超越 AI 的优势。

To highlight the previous post: But what is taste? I would define it as some kind of sense of aesthetics and judgment coming from experience and intuition, being able to say whether something is good or bad without necessarily being able to explain why. 引用前文的观点：究竟什么是品味？我会将其定义为一种源于经验和直觉的审美与判断力，即无需解释原因就能判断事物好坏的能力。

This seems like a reasonable explanation. “Aesthetics and judgement”… coming from “experience and intuition”. Okay, interesting. 这听起来是一个合理的解释。“审美与判断”……源于“经验与直觉”。好吧，有点意思。

But where does taste come from? Every now and then there’s a famous Rick Rubin or (sigh) Steve Jobs type character, who is a non-practitioner who undoubtedly does move mountains around their sense of taste, and so I think lots of people are hoping they can rely on maybe being such an exceptional figure themselves. 但品味究竟从何而来？时不时会出现像 Rick Rubin 或（叹气）史蒂夫·乔布斯那样的人物，他们并非具体的创作者，却无疑凭借自己的品味撼动了行业。因此，我想很多人都希望自己也能成为那样卓越的人物。

But it’s important to realize that in the case of Rick Rubin or Steve Jobs, these are people who had strong taste who were also in positions of power and themselves were curating practitioners who themselves had exceptional taste. Which means that in order to produce something interesting and exceptional, they were curating practitioners who operated away from the averages who did the actual work. 但必须意识到，Rick Rubin 或史蒂夫·乔布斯这类人，不仅拥有极高的品味，还身居高位，他们所挑选的创作者本身也具备卓越的品味。这意味着，为了产出有趣且杰出的作品，他们挑选的是那些远离平庸、真正进行创作的实践者。

But if your practitioner is an LLM, then you’re not a Steve Jobs or a Rick Rubin. Your practitioner is the averages. 但如果你的“创作者”是一个大语言模型（LLM），那你既不是史蒂夫·乔布斯，也不是 Rick Rubin。你的创作者只是“平均值”的集合。

So you’d better have exceptional taste yourself, and here’s the thing: ultimately, taste in terms of practice has to come from doing the practice yourself, and trying and failing and thinking something will be interesting and then you find you actually don’t like it, or you try something and you end up having a wonderful accident or make up for some sort of thing that you’re not good at, and that becomes your style, and your style defines the taste and preferences that you shape around it. 所以你最好自己拥有卓越的品味。关键在于：归根结底，实践层面的品味必须源于你亲身的实践——通过尝试、失败，以为某样东西会很有趣，结果发现自己并不喜欢；或者在尝试中意外收获惊喜，弥补了自己不擅长的短板，从而形成了你的风格，而这种风格又定义了你围绕它所塑造的品味和偏好。

So… I’m afraid that to develop taste, you’re going to need to spend a lot of time not using generative AI to develop it. Which a lot of people are finding themselves having a hard time motivating themselves to do. 所以……恐怕要培养品味，你得花大量时间“不使用”生成式 AI。而很多人发现自己很难有动力去这样做。

In fact, I’d even say that using generative AI tools results in becoming nose-blind to their bad smells. And speaking of taste, here’s an interesting example: here’s an article called “Taste Is All That’s Left” which sounds not only tastelessly like every other article advocating for “taste” right now, but even worse, has all the smells of an LLM-written blogpost. It rose to the top of Hacker News and Lobste.rs and in both, people were pointing out left and right how much it sounds like it was LLM written. But the author swears it wasn’t written by an LLM! And I believe them, but it sounds like it was written by an LLM. Why? 事实上，我甚至认为，使用生成式 AI 工具会导致你对它们产生的“恶臭”变得迟钝。说到品味，这里有一个有趣的例子：有一篇文章叫《剩下的只有品味》（Taste Is All That’s Left），它不仅读起来像现在所有鼓吹“品味”的文章一样乏味，更糟糕的是，它充满了大语言模型写作的“味道”。它登上了 Hacker News 和 Lobste.rs 的榜首，在这两个平台上，人们纷纷指出它听起来有多像 AI 写的。但作者发誓它不是 AI 写的！我相信他们，但它听起来确实像 AI 写的。为什么？

And so the most interesting part to me was that the author themselves acknowledged the problem with a good heaping of self-realization in a thread on lobste.rs: 对我来说，最有趣的部分是作者本人在 lobste.rs 的讨论串中，带着深刻的自我觉察承认了这个问题：

“AI detector or not, I have been feeling the same drop in quality and insight in my posts and I, well, can’t pretend there hasn’t been a shift. I’d be lying to you and to myself if I had said I didn’t see it. Consequently, I have re-read my post after it hit Hacker News and a friend kindly informing me of it. I’ll tell you this much: the only thing I had in my mind was ‘how the FUCK did I write like this’. Hilariously, I was thinking ‘I have not written anything with real depth in a while’ to myself earlier this week.” “无论 AI 检测器怎么说，我确实感觉到我的文章在质量和洞察力上有所下降，我无法假装这种转变不存在。如果我说我没察觉到，那是在欺骗你们，也是在欺骗我自己。因此，在文章登上 Hacker News 且一位朋友好心提醒我之后，我重读了它。我只能说：我当时脑子里唯一的想法就是‘我他妈是怎么写出这种东西的’。可笑的是，本周早些时候我还在想‘我已经很久没写出有深度东西了’。”

”[…] I have spent a good while contemplating whether it was the machines that write like me, or if I write like the machines. I hesitate to say I think it is a combination of both. What I did do---without ever clocking it as a decision---was spend a year reading the things and working next to them daily, until their ‘cadence’ was part of my mental archive.” “[……] 我花了不少时间思考，到底是机器在模仿我的写作方式，还是我在模仿机器。我倾向于认为两者皆有。我所做的是——虽然从未将其视为一个刻意的决定——花了一年时间阅读这些内容，并每天与它们并肩工作，直到它们的‘节奏’成为了我思维库的一部分。”

Props, first of all, to the author for taking the feedback well. But also, this last sentence is really interesting to me, because it hints at something worse than just “you need to develop taste before you start using generative AI”: that the use of such tools can actively weaken your sense of taste. 首先，要为作者能够虚心接受反馈点赞。但同时，最后那句话让我觉得非常有趣，因为它暗示了一个比“你在使用生成式 AI 前需要先培养品味”更糟糕的事实：使用这些工具可能会主动削弱你的品味。

So the best way to retain taste is probably to use these tools as sparingly as possible. 所以，保持品味的最好方法，可能就是尽可能少地使用这些工具。

Of course, which means that those practitioners who don’t use genAI will become the favorites for the machine to consume and ingest. See also David Revoy’s piece on the matter. 当然，这意味着那些不使用生成式 AI 的创作者，将成为机器吞噬和摄取的首选目标。参考 David Revoy 关于此事的文章。

So, your best defense against the blandness machine is to largely not use it. But if you produce something good enough, the blandness machine will eat you anyway. 所以，对抗平庸机器最好的防御手段就是尽量不用它。但如果你产出的东西足够好，平庸机器最终还是会把你吃掉。

I don’t know any solution to that, but I guess: keep making weird art. It’s the best way to stay interesting, and the best way to add taste to this increasingly averaged world. 我不知道有什么解决办法，但我猜：继续创作古怪的艺术吧。这是保持趣味性的最好方式，也是为这个日益平庸的世界增添品味的最好方式。