Why tech bros are so worried about AI having bad taste

These days, tech bros keep talking about “taste”— the ability to exercise human judgment and determine unique responses while guiding a machine. It’s a rare skillset, as some AI-made media automates content in the form of generic slop. And now tech professionals are the very people worried that technology will rob society of any real taste.

The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka, who broke down tech bros’ obsession with taste last month, coined the term “taste-washing” as the act of giving “anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.” In other words: giving AI properties human-like qualities and letting them run with it. When machines do all the creating, what are we left with?

Taste is in right now, especially in tech circles. Chayka first reported on taste and technology in a 2018 essay for Racked, now Vox, called “Style Is an Algorithm.” Chayka now points out that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote that in an AI age “taste will become even more important” in an X post. OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, agreed, sharing in an online post: “Taste is a new core skill.” And Koen Bok, the founder of AI design tool Framer, said that those with “great taste” will build the next great products in a podcast last month.

While many people may not necessarily equate tech bros with “taste,” it is a group known for a preferring specific style, from quarter zips to Allbirds sneakers. (And, of course, there’s Steve Jobs and his custom Issey Miyake turtlenecks.) 

This trend has led some tech giants to try upholding taste themselves: Last year, Anthropic held a pop-up called “Zero Slop Zone” in New York, handing out lattes and hats labeled “thinking.” Mark Zuckerberg attended a Prada show in February, hinting at the company’s interest in style and taste.​

Despite the declared need for “taste” by tech giants, and that AI is a threat to it—others argue that AI can be trained to develop taste over time

Head of product for AI company Linear, Nan Yu, is among the critics who believe AI bots can curate taste. “I hate to break this to everyone, but you probably don’t have better taste than the AI,” he wrote in an X post.​

During the Super Bowl, OpenAI aired ads filmed from a synthetic human’s point of view. And researchers have already begun training AI to detect taste, with a March 2026 research paper reporting that a small AI model, trained on citations, could detect which papers will be hits. This means that training AI on citations could lead AI to generate research ideas with long-term impacts. 

“Citations, upvotes & shares are signals that can teach AI judgment about quality, not just execution,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who studies AI in work settings, in an online post.

​AI machines are inherently uncool, and their brands are all after uniqueness despite their core products being trained to replicate human responses. Many people already see AI tools as a threat to their careers, futures and their own creative output. “AI-washing” became a buzzword earlier this year as companies blamed mass layoffs on AI advancements. Although companies attributed financial cuts to future AI implementation, many lacked the AI infrastructure to presently fill those vacant roles, according to a January report by market research firm Forrester.

Tech companies value curation and human judgment as a core skill to excel in the tech sphere. But many argue machines are already doing all the creating. Matt Shumer, who wrote “Something Big is Happening” essay on AI, believes that in a couple years, AI will have better ideas. 

“I don’t see why ‘taste’ and direction are uniquely human, like many people say,” he wrote in an X post. “If an AI can train on it, it can learn it.”

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