CONCEPT
The Crisis of Taste Under Abundant Production
When AI raises the floor of output quality while lowering the ceiling, the spectrum compresses — making discrimination difficult and taste development impossible without deliberate exposure to failure.
Taste is the capacity to distinguish adequate from excellent within a field of aesthetic objects.
Bourdieu demonstrated that taste is socially constituted — built through exposure, practice, and calibration against a ground of contrast. The wine student who has tasted only excellent wine cannot identify excellence. The architecture student who has studied only beautiful buildings cannot perceive beauty. Taste requires the experience of gradation: mediocre, competent, good, extraordinary. AI compresses this spectrum. The floor of AI production is remarkably high — code works, prose is fluent, analysis is structured. The ceiling is characteristically modest. The range
between worst and best narrows. The result: a production environment where adequacy is ambient, everything is pretty good, and the distance taste exists to perceive has become so narrow that perception itself becomes difficult.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The crisis is not a crisis of supply — there is no shortage of aesthetic objects to evaluate. It is a crisis of demand. Demand for taste