> In other words, she doesn’t have taste; she has a reflection of collective human taste, filtered through what makes sense for this store. And this is the way these models work.

Well, it really depends on what you mean here. Models aren't 100% deterministic, there is random chance involved. You ask the exact same question twice, you will get two slightly different answers.

If you have the AI record the random selections it makes, it can persist those random choices to be factors in future decisions it makes.

At that point, could you consider those decisions to be the AI's 'taste'? Yes, they were determined by some random selection amongst the existing human tastes, but why can't that be considered the AI's taste?