🌳 Taste is an antidote to slop
We've been living in an age of information overload for a while now, but the last few years have turned that dial up to eleven. Now that our machines can trivially write words and produce pictures, we must realize that writing is more than words, and art is more than pictures.
To produce something worthy of human consumption, we must develop taste. It has become so easy for us to produce something—writing, code, media, etc.—that we forgot how to produce something worthwhile. The things most worthy of consumption require time, care, and opinions; it's true for writing, software, art, music, food, and so much more.
A lack of this time, care, and opinion—in other words, a lack of taste—is what causes "slop." Without taste, we find social media posts with perfect grammar but identical sentence patterns. We see tech billboards with clever messages but the same overused design languages. We attend presentations with fancy slides, but the presenters never took the time to read them. And we get vibe-coded apps that might work flawlessly but feel inoffensive and uninspiring.
Interestingly, all of these problems existed well before the 2020s' AI boom. It doesn't matter what tools we use, but, especially now, we ought to learn how to wrangle them. We must take our time with them, care about what we make, and remain a little opinionated and stubborn.
Our machines are amazingly powerful, but we don't know how to point them. Taste is what we can use to aim.