Taste,” musical artist and social scientist Addison Rae proclaimed last year, “is kind of a luxury.” She was talking about how dancing for the masses on TikTok afforded her the freedom to make niche pop music. But Rae had punched in what might’ve been the most prescient quote of 2025, because in 2026 “taste” has become the latest buzzword squawked around Silicon Valley. Once upon a time, tech’s power was to wizard things out of thin air using the power of code. Now, AI can code anything for anybody and, according to venture capitalists and people who post like them, taste will separate the winners and losers of the AI arms race. The best AIs will not just code something, they’ll code something people desire. At a minimum, they have to code things that look credible to the remaining powerful people who already have taste.
In April, Marc Andreessen oozed on Twitter: “Three things the leading AI models are quite good at: long-term planning, idea generation, and taste. Sorry, but it’s true.” This from the man who once said that “learning to code is the single best thing anyone can do to get the most out of the amazing future in front of us.”
One takeaway is that the average person should take the pronouncements of Silicon Valley’s ruling class with a (planet-size) grain of salt. Another is to relish (with no small amount of schadenfreude) and capitalize on this moment: the “revenge of the liberal arts grad.”
The interest in taste from Silicon Valley is “a genuine desire,” said Sean Monahan, the trend forecaster and 8Ball newsletter author (who’s also largely responsible for coinages like “normcore” and “vibe shift”). Tech money produced rising classes who want to be elites, Monahan theorizes, but their cultural capital hasn’t materialized. “They want to believe that because there’s a larger number attached to their net worth, their opinion matters more,” he said. “That’s not really the case with culture. There are probably 10,000 people in the world, maybe less, who really do dictate what’s happening and where culture is going. And they all know each other. These new ideas and trajectories come out of the conversations those people are having with each other.” Monahan thinks AI will struggle to have taste because it’s a product that needs to scale, whereas culture is shifted by “some of richest, most elite people in the world, and broke 25-year-old artists.” He added: “As soon as something becomes conspicuously middle class, it’s rejected.”
“AI is always using the past to project the future,” said Ben Dietz, a creative consultant who writes the newsletter [SIC] Weekly, and the past “is not a useful predictor of the future if you’re trying to actually do something disruptive.” As for AI’s standing among the next generation of young people who will disrupt and reset the cultural agenda, Dietz recalled a recent conversation with his college-aged son, a film student. “The use of AI among my peers is really seen as low-status behavior,” the son sniffed.