My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial taste is not taste.

In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.

The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.

By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.

I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.

I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.

Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.

I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.

Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.

It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.

Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.