4/9/2026
The 33 Project ~ AI • "Taste" • On "The Drama"
Hello hello. Happy Thursday.
Let’s get into the recs for today - some really good reads for you.
1/ Why cant AI write? Great piece on what makes LLM’s incapable of an engaging voice.
Authorial voice emerges from the specificity of a life.
!!!
2/ Speaking of AI, let’s talk about “taste” and why it’s the new buzzword for Tech companies. (Original link, here).
We might call what’s going on now “taste-washing,” an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism. The Times perpetuated this mythmaking when it launched a poll last week asking users to read passages drawn from well-known works of literature, and passages generated by A.I., and choose which they preferred stylistically. Nearly fifty per cent of participants preferred the texts written by artificial intelligence. Is A.I. now so adept that it can write like Hilary Mantel? Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted—so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz—that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.
Loved this part:
Voltaire once wrote that, “in order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it.” No large language model has yet been programmed to feel anything, and no number of branded baseball caps is going to change that.
3/ Thought this was an interesting take on The Drama. Spoiler alert big time, but interesting for those who have seen it! I don’t agree with everything in the take, but I definitely appreciate what’s being said.
That’s it for today. BTW, are you listening to The Idiot? Susannah and I plowed through three eps the other day and I need to finish it! Will likely be recommending it once I’m finished. Stay tuned on that. Have a good one and thanks as always for reading and sharing.