llms

Celine Nguyen in Asterisk, on what Silicon Valley means when it talks about taste. She goes back to the Victorians, who had a near-identical panic about automation and answered it by founding design schools, and to the Bauhaus, which taught aesthetic perception as a skill rather than an innate gift. Both sit somewhat awkwardly against the current line that taste is the one thing a model can’t do.

She also describes teaching herself typography by collecting a large scraped dataset of images and learning to categorise them, a comparison she makes on purpose.