Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste

Kyle Chayka coins "taste-washing" to describe AI companies borrowing humanist aesthetics: Anthropic's pop-up café, OpenAI's analog-shot Super Bowl ad. The coinage is useful, but Chayka's own evidence undercuts his thesis: a NYT poll showing 50% of readers preferred AI-generated prose over literary passages suggests quality convergence, not cultural pollution. The interesting tension isn't whether AI has taste; it's that the cultural class is arguing about aesthetics while the quality gap quietly closes.