flâneur

In pursuit of a benchmark for human taste.

notes.designarena.ai · 405 words · saved by 2 readers

We know when we like something, but when asked why, we stumble over our words and hallucinate reasoning. We contradict ourselves—we don’t know why we like a thing, we just do. There exist people who understand our preferences better than we do ourselves. Let’s call them Tastemakers. Tastemakers know what we really want, not just what we say we want. Not a faster horse; a car. Great taste is a marker of how well we are understood. Today’s frontier models still struggle to make the designs that we describe—a non-trivial percentage of the outputs on Design Arena are white text on a white background. But just teaching the models to make what the user asked for is not enough to teach models taste. Prompt adherence will never train the model to make the outcomes so ideal that we don’t even know to ask for them. The ability to cater to an audience, sometimes in spite of what the audience says it wants, is an objective, measurable skill. This is a verifiable evaluation—you just have to ask the

We know when we like something, but when asked why, we stumble over our words and hallucinate reasoning. We contradict ourselves—we don’t know why we like a thing, we just do. There exist people who understand our preferences better than we do ourselves. Let’s call them Tastemakers. Tastemakers know what we really want, not just what we say we want. Not a faster horse; a car. Great taste is a marker of how well we are understood. Today’s frontier models still struggle to make the designs that we describe—a non-trivial percentage of the outputs on Design Arena are white text on a white…

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