>We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.

It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.

"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.

But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.

In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.

PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.

Yes, that's fair. But at least if judged purely on output, human taste is no moat.

So, if we're going to preserve human art, we either need AI to fail naturally, or we need to explicitly reject it. The same goes for the rest of human creativity.