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Toward Computational Taste: LLMs, Aesthetics & Judgment - Patron

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Ten years ago, the internet still felt like a place you visited. Taste existed as something humans curated for one another: fashion bloggers posted flat lays, museum curators selected exhibitions, editors filtered and packaged culture into glossy magazines. The digital world was engineered to showcase human taste. Today, the digital world is engineered to learn it. But taste is slippery. One of the paradoxes of preference is that we crave novelty, and novelty reshapes our preferences. As Oscar Wilde quipped, fashion is “a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.” We chase the new, and in doing so, our idea of what’s good or beautiful shifts. Taste is not fixed, it’s dynamic, adaptive, and socially constructed. This is what makes computational taste so fascinating: it forces us to ask whether machines can model something that is designed to change. For centuries, taste was framed as an individual faculty, the “ability to discern what is of goo

Toward Computational Taste: LLMs, Aesthetics & Judgment Amber Atherton 01/05/2025 Toward Computational Taste: LLMs, Aesthetics & Judgment A.Atherton (2025) Ten years ago, the internet still felt like a place you visited. Taste existed as something humans curated for one another: fashion bloggers posted flat lays, museum curators selected exhibitions, editors filtered and packaged culture into glossy magazines. The digital world was engineered to showcase human taste. Today, the digital world is engineered to learn it. But taste is slippery. One of the paradoxes of preference is that we crave n

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