This article is based on Mitchell Hashimoto's article 'Defining Taste' on In particular, it emphasizes why 'taste' is emerging as a more important differentiation in the era of universalization of production capacity, and that although 'taste' is easy to imitate, its value still lies in original judgment ability.

1. What is 'taste'? 🤔

Mitchell Hashimoto defines 'taste' as the ability to consistently make high-quality subjective judgments in the absence of objective standards. It's as if you intuitively think, 'This is it!' It's like creating a result that you can feel. There is no way to clearly measure it, but it is an ability that makes people think 'Oh, this is really good!' when they see the result.

"Taste" is the ability to consistently make high-quality qualitative judgments where no objective metric exists. It's the creation of something that feels right intuitively, with no real justifiable way to measure that. But when you do it, people feel it. (Taste is the ability to consistently make high-quality subjective judgments in the absence of objective standards. It's about creating things that feel intuitively right, and there's no good way to measure it, but people feel it when they do.)

A person with 'good taste' is someone who can make these judgments consistently. But the interesting thing is, although this taste is difficult to create, the result can be copied very easily. When someone makes a tasteful decision, others can imitate it almost immediately. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

2. Imitation and originality: Who has real taste? 🧐

Because of this, it is often claimed that 'taste does not exist!' "Look! How easy it is to copy what you made!" While doing so. But what's interesting is that if someone hadn't created it first, you wouldn't have been able to copy it in the first place. This means that the person who created it first had a 'taste', but the person who simply imitated it did not have it. ✨

This is usually an argument against the existence of taste: "look how easy I can copy your work!" And yet, you couldn't create the work without first having someone to copy it from. One has taste, the other doesn't. (This usually leads to an argument denying the existence of taste: "Look! How easy it is for your work to be copied!" But you couldn't have created it if there wasn't someone to copy. One side has taste, the other doesn't.)

3. The rise of 'taste': why is it more important now? 📈

Throughout history, there have always been people with consistently good taste. However, the author says that recently the importance of 'taste' has been emphasized more than ever. Now 'taste' is becoming an important differentiating factor. 🚀

For a long time, the ability to turn an idea into reality has been of great value. But today, production capabilities are rapidly becoming commonplace. What used to require an entire team can now be accomplished by just one person with a clear vision. This is mainly due to advances in AI, but also increased levels of abstraction. 🤖

4. Production is universal, taste is rare 💎

In the end, the speed at which production capacity is 'commercialized' is much faster than 'taste'. So, it is still unclear whether AI can truly create 'taste'. At least for now, the ability to make qualitatively new judgments remains a uniquely human domain. 🧠

Production is being commercialized much much faster than taste. It's an open question of whether AI will be able to produce "taste." For now, the ability to create qualitatively new judgments remains distinctly human. (Production is becoming commoditized much faster than taste. It is still unclear whether AI will be able to create 'taste'. For now, the ability to make qualitatively new judgments remains a uniquely human domain.)

So 'taste' is not valuable because it cannot be copied. Rather, it's valuable **because it 'defines' what everyone else should copy. Taste has always existed, but now we value it more highly.

Mitchell Hashimoto concludes by adding that this article was handwritten in Apple Notes on an airplane without Wi-Fi. 📝

Conclusion

This article clearly shows how human's unique 'taste' and 'subjective judgment ability' have become valuable and important assets as production barriers are lowered and AI technology develops as we enter the digital age. Rather than denigrating the value of 'taste' because it is easy to imitate, it suggests that it is time to understand and develop the true value of 'taste' as an original force that presents standards for imitation.