The Opinions - What Silicon Valley Is Coming for Next

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Silicon Valley wants to be the best tastemaker in town. Artificial intelligence is changing how we decide what to wear and read and how we interact with pop culture. The Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman talks to the New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka and the journalist and critic Sophie Haigney about the rise of “taste slop” and what happens to culture if the internet collapses into just a few chatbots that serve us everything. Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishkaha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Jasmine Romero. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Video editing by Steph Khoury. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm not just Beagleman, and I'm a culture editor for New York Times Opinion. There's something I just can't stop watching. Fruit Love Island. Welcome to Fruit Love Island, where eight single fruits are about to flirt, fight, and trucks. It's just an AI-slop version of the reality television show, but with humanoid fruits dating around instead of real people. Hi, I'm Passiona. I'm 23, a passion fruit from Massachusetts. I'm Lanira. I'm a lime from Miami.

And it's really bad, obviously. But there's something about it that just has me hooked. And I'm not alone. Fruit Love Island averaged over 10 million views for each of its episodes. And now Silicon Valley is showing a new interest in being cool and in the idea of taste. Jeff Bezos was an honorary chair of the Mexican. Gallo, Palantir launched a trendy chore coat. An OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman posted on X, Taste is a new core skill. So what's going to happen if AI starts creating culture that is actually good?

How are any of us going to resist taste slop? Today I'm talking to Kyle Chaka, a New Yorker writer who's been covering the way Silicon Valley is shaping our culture. And to Sophie Higney, a writer and critic who thinks a lot about whether taste is fundamentally human. Kyle, Sophie, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. Yeah, thank you for having us. Yeah, excited to be here. The reason why we're talking about taste and AI right now

is in part because Silicon Valley has become really interested in this recently. The president of OpenAI Greg Brockman tweeted, Taste is the new core skill. And in planning for this, I have read endless tech blogs about taste, which is odd to me because I think of Silicon Valley is fundamentally anti-taste. Kyle, you wrote about this recently. What is going on there? Why does Silicon Valley care about taste?

Oh my God. I feel like it's because they realize they don't have it, kind of. Like, I started noticing it in the last year or two, I would say, as generative AI has become more and more popular and, like, seen more uptake with normal people. And I think the tech vanguard are kind of like, AI isn't just slop. Like, we'll create tasteful things with AI. We need to be enlightened about what we choose. choose to make and we need to exercise our personal judgment in order to use this new crazy tool.

Yes. And so I think they've realized that taste is something that they need and desperately are trying to claim but are maybe not achieving that quite yet. Yes. Yeah, there's definitely like an element of cope to their taste obsession. I also, yeah, I mean, I think they're like having a hard time, like the products that they're putting out, like Claude and ChachyPT, they're having a hard time making the case that these are cool because they're kind of not.

Like, when the iPhone came out, it was cool. Steve Jobs was like cool. I remember the old Apple iPod ads. Like, they were selling something that had a very clear design aesthetic. It was like a physical object. I think a lot of people are just like looking at AI and they're like, this is, this is cringe. Like, yeah, this is just not cool.

Like Sam Allman is not a cool guy. No. In the way that Steve Jobs could be a cool guy. At least he had something going on. He had a vibe. They're very vibeless. And so I think, yeah, the vibleness of AI. It means that people have to kind of cling to this life raft of the idea of taste.

Yeah, I think that's true. And taste, I mean, we could talk for a long time just trying to define taste, but you've both thought about this a lot. You wrote a whole chapter about it in your book, Filter World, and Sophie, you're working on a book about collecting where you've written a chapter about taste. What is your sort of, like, working definition of taste for this conversation? I mean, I think basically it's about how you respond to things that are in your environment. If you see a lamp, do you love it? Does it repulse you? Do you want it? Does it remind you of

something? You're like making all of these instantaneous judgments about things based on what feels like instinct and pure preference to you, but is actually something that's like very much shaped by your background, by things you've seen in magazines or more likely now on Instagram. But I think the way we experience it is almost just like magic. Like we just connect with something or we don't. Yeah, it's like ephemeral and magical and instantaneous and it happens inside of you. I think in my book and like other research, the idea of taste traces back to like 18th century philosophers. So there's this great Monteschi quote that I've written down on my phone because I like it so much. Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge. It's a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know.

And I think that's what Sophie was talking about a little bit. Like you don't, you can't guess it in a advance, you can't predict your reaction to something. It's just this response within yourself. But it's interesting because as I'm listening to you talk, that specific definition, a quick and responsive response to a series of rules that we cannot know, isn't that also exactly what LLMs are to some degree? And if taste is formed by consuming an enormous amount of information, couldn't an LLM theoretically do that better than a human could? The ingesting data is a really interesting part of it. Like, LLMs do have access to the whole of human knowledge in some ways, as a French philosopher maybe thought they did in 1750s.

But to me, taste is not just like that knowledge or the facticity of it, like, to know something. It's to actually appreciate it and to feel it. To feel it, which is what an own AI can't do. Right. So it could suggest something to you. It could produce text that makes you feel something. But, like, the feeling is never in the LLM. And when Sophie was talking about vibes before, there's like academic work now on how vibes are like these implied connections between huge sets of data and that like LLMs are made up of vibes.

There's academic work on vibes? Yes. There definitely is. I think there's a new book coming out pretty soon. I want to become a professor of vibes studies. Yeah, so maybe this is also the AI taste connection because it's like it is abstract and like we don't totally understand it. Yeah? But to me, it's still a computer. And a computer fundamentally can't have an embodied reaction to a piece of art.

I don't think so. Yeah, I mean, I basically agree. I think there's so much of like, can an LLM, does an LLM really have a concept of beauty? Like, does an LLM really have a concept of hating something? But they can parrot it. And a lot of people do parroting and tastes too. Like, you know, there's a lot of taste that is fundamental. A lot of the way we express, taste is like consumption. We buy clothes that we think look cool. We read books maybe that we think will make us seem cool. And LLMs are not bad at that. Like before this, I asked chat GPT. I was like, what are five books I could read that would make me seem like I have good taste? It was like a Rachel

Cusk book, a Maggie Nelson book, never let me go. It was very like, it felt like slightly dated, but I was like, okay, if you went to a party in Brooklyn and you talked about those books, Like, you're not off base, but there is that kind of missing fundamental experience. But then I feel like once the machine can reproduce that taste or that style, then we've all moved on. Right. Right. It does feel like really a little bit dated. Yeah, once it's so predictable.

Yeah. Is the reason Silicon Valley is so interested in taste right now in part because it's perhaps like the final frontier of what makes us human? Like one of the things that is essentially human. Yeah, it's like love and taste and beauty. And that's what AI is kind of trying to disrupt. Like it's technology that targets exactly our human identity and our sense of self and our sense of what people can do and can't do. And so I think they are chasing technology that replicates taste in a way and they want to disrupt it in the same way that, I don't know, Facebook disrupted communication and friendship. Now AI is disrupting your own taste in culture, even more so than algorithmic feeds have.

Can you say more about that? How is AI disrupting our taste in culture even more than algorithmic feeds? To me, the era of generative AI is kind of a successor and an intensifier of the last era of digital technology, which was algorithmic recommendations. So algorithmic recommendations kind of pushed bodies of content and culture at you and tried to guess what you wanted. and now the promise or the hope in Silicon Valley for AI is that it just produces what you want. You barely have to speak it or think it, and AI will deliver to you the fruit love island of your dreams. Or like, what if Baby Yoda was in James Bond?

And the taste problem is like, that is their idea of goodness, I think, that like wish-fulfillment sense of culture and art. And there's also, I mean, you can fine tune more and more about what you want. I was looking at this, like, AI matchmaking dating app that was like you could, the number of variables you could filter someone by included like percentage body fat. And they were claiming that they could like look at the picture of someone's face and tell what they were going to be.

And AI like didn't create weird bad body standards, nor did it like create the problems of dating apps. But I think it will intensify this like. hyper, hyper specification of what you want and then getting that wish back. Yeah, I like that idea of wish fulfillment culture. I mean, I hate the idea of it. But I think that seems to speak to this era where you can increasingly like tweak and tweak and tweak and get closer to what you want and it will just be delivered to you.

That is dystopic to me. And like taste comes from outside of you, I think. Like as we were talking about the definition before, it surprises you. Like it's not what you guessed it was. It's something that comes up and brings you somewhere new. Yeah, I mean, I think that for me, I asked my dad when I was, like, seven, what is art? And he was about to go into the dentist office and get laughing gas and was, like, hold that thought. I'll think about this better when I've had laughing gas.

And then he came out and was like, art is giving shape to your thoughts and emotions. And that's obviously the artist's perspective of what is art. But I think it's what we want when we engage with it. We want to feel like, oh, this is someone else. who has experienced being alive, who knows that they can die, who has fallen in love, who has a body that can be harmed. And this is what it is like to experience the world through their mind. And that even if AI can perfectly simulate that experience,

there's a feeling of coldness that comes from knowing that you're not connecting to another living being. But as I've been thinking about this episode and talking to you guys about it, I do keep going to like, but does it really matter? Like, is our fear about, like, a sort of a culture in which a lot of things can be, I think right now, AI can't quite do this. But I would imagine that, like, maybe five years from now, AI could write a perfectly passable Rachel Cusk novel. Am I, am I? Is that an insult to Rachel Cuss?

No, oh, my God. I was only using her as a marker of good taste. Well, I mean, the comparison of people. use and that I've deployed myself probably several times is that generative AI is similar to when painting encountered photography. Like photography, the invention of photography, it was able to exactly reproduce reality. It was able to create the most realistic image possible. And so painting responded to that by getting crazier, by not depicting reality, by moving into emotional, abstract painting and like gesture and things that were not about depicting.

what's in front of you. So I feel like AI can, it's kind of like the photography in the situation where it can create simulacra of art. It can create things that are like art or have artistic qualities. And that the profusion of that kind of slop, basically high on slop, which the trend forecaster Emily Siegel recently called taste slop, like high end slop, that might push artists and writers and creators to go farther. Taste slop is so interesting to me as a word,

because part of what I was thinking about when I was thinking about this is like AI slop, we call it that to kind of intentionally signify that this is of bad taste. Derogatory, yeah. So taste slop creates such an interesting mishmash of where this might all be going. But I think my question is still like,

you both had this sort of instinctive reaction that having a cultural production machine give you exactly what you want would be bad. But why? I mean, in some ways we do already live in a world where that is true. I feel like you're constantly getting served something based on what you listened to before. But accelerating that, I mean, I just think so much of like what makes consuming culture worthwhile is like to be surprised, to be challenged, to experience emotions you didn't expect to feel. Which doesn't mean there's no room for like the town starring Ben Affleck. Like I also like culture that I don't necessarily think is good, but provides me pleasure.

But I don't want a world where that entirely crowds out this whole other field of things that really like, that I can't predict, that might like move me in ways I don't even want to be moved. I feel like that's like, that's a really bad future. And I feel like, I'm like, well, what is even the point of being human? Like, what are the point? What are the point of these tools? How are they going to, what are they going to do for me if they're kind of violated? that fundamental human experience. Yeah.

There was this flaw in some AI models that they were too obsequious. Like they would give you too much of what you wanted, and they would praise you too much and compliment you too much. And people got AI psychosis from this obsequiousness. But I feel like that AI's tendency to not challenge you and to not push you and to be so agreeable limits its ability to deliver culture that's challenging also. Are all of these, like, anxieties that we feel about how AI will shape our culture? Is somewhere at the root of that anxiety, the fear that we are all basic?

The fear that we are all kind of mid and basic, if left to our own devices? I guess I feel like more of the anxieties come out of a place of, like, what is, I mean, one of the reasons I think people are obsessed with taste is because they just think AI is going to take everything from them or it's going to, like, revolutionize everything. And so people are clinging to these life rafts and taste is one of them. I mean, like, it's scary. It's scary out there with AI. And we're being told a lot of stuff with varying degrees of confidence that we don't know if it's true. Like, is AI going to take all our jobs or like not really matter that much? I think the like uncertainty around it is very confusing.

Yeah. Yeah, we just don't know what will happen. It's like people are adopting the tools. Like AI is being used in filmmaking and in music and everything. and we can't quite recognize it yet, or maybe we are in the point where we can recognize it a little and soon we won't be able to at all. And so there's this fear that, like, I don't know,

the humanity is being cut through or adulterated with this new machinic stuff. And is that an old fear that we've always had about technology? Like, is to some degree, should we be thinking about AI as it could be applied to culture as, like, not so different from Photoshop or CGI? Yeah, was it the Plato thing that, like written language is bad and it will cause people to not remember anything. That turned out

okay and photography turned out okay. And I'm sure we'll adapt to AI. But I don't know, I just keep coming back to like social media is now widely recognized as not very good for a lot of civilization. And so I don't know, I hope we don't rush uncritically into this next mass adoption of technology, which is generative AI. Yeah. Though I'm sure we will, sadly. I mean, I also want to talk about how AI is going to change the economic models for working artists. Could you tell me about that? Yeah, I think AI is already changing how artists survive.

Because the way that these AI models work and the reason that they exist is because they have hoovered up all of human culture that all artists ever made already. And we put into digital form and so it could be mashed into a machine and turned into a trained model. Like the models that exist now do not exist without all of the human art and writing and culture that came before them. And I think in automating all of that stuff, it has kind of made it even more difficult for artists to survive. And the artists are not profiting from the way that their work was digested into these machines. Like illustrators and graphic designers are seeing their livelihoods vanish. So I feel like AI itself is making that situation worse, where they're, fewer artists and creators who can make a living, and they have a harder time reaching the people

who would sustain their careers. And at the same time, AI companies, which are now valued in the trillions of dollars probably, are not paying any royalties or fees. They're not supporting artists. They're not generating new culture of their own or, like, creating a sustainable ecosystem. I think it's generally as kind of impoverishing the cultural production model, which it's in turn replacing. And so that makes it harder for us to have new culture and to even have a more organic grassroots culture that we can enjoy. Yeah. And then I mean like the I was reading an article in Wired, the headline of which was I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now secretly training AI. And it was about how the AI training company Mercor has about 30,000

freelancers, basically just people training their own replacements. And TV is a particularly dangerous one because people have rarely known who is in the writer's room. Like, we don't have the same attachment to the human behind it. And if AI starts making prestige TV, my worry is also, like, what is the messaging behind it? Like, what would we be getting out of an AI-created version of the wire? Like, what kind of values is it going to be giving us? Probably whatever it's been trained and waited to do by the companies that make the models. Like, I don't know.

There have been some studies that. large AI models trend toward liberalism or, you know, they like socialism a little bit more than you might expect because they see it as a logical, I don't know, sustainable civilization or something. But I think we should not trust that the models that we're using and that are being adopted are in any way neutral or creative or not following kind of secret weights, as they call them, more variables that are in the systems planted there by the founders of the company. There's just too much incentive for the companies to mess with them up, for them not to interfere, basically. Yeah, that's part of, that's like, like, one of my anxieties about AI and culture is, like, are we actually just all basic?

And is that the fear. But the other one is, like, so much of what we understand about the world, like, when we read novels, when we read Tolstoy, like, we're understanding so much about what a certain set of values are about the world, a certain sense of, like, what it means to be alive and how and very politically what it means. to be alive and how. And I worry that if we start consuming things that are made by AI, these Silicon Valley companies are so openly in bed with the government. AI companies and executives are major political donors in the 26th election campaign cycle. They've pledged $150 million to influence AI legislation. Is there anything stopping companies like Anthropic or Open AI from introducing politically motivated messaging into the culture that we consume? I don't think so.

I mean, social media had a lot of these same problems. There's been very little regulation of it, and I think we can see a model or an idea of what might happen with Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into X and absolutely perverting the variables of the feed and absolutely prioritizing content that, say, praises Elon Musk. Yeah. We've experienced this.

Yeah, yeah, we know what happens. The political transition of like an algorithmic feed. I feel like X is a really good example just of how one individual's political, like, political viewpoints can just be injected and like into mass consumption. And I find X such a good example because so many of my friends and colleagues who know this, who know that X is now algorithmically weighted towards Elon Musk's specific politics, still somewhere in their brain look at it and think, oh, that's what people are saying.

Guilty. I'm guilty. It's hard to escape that, especially because before it was maybe a little bit better. And I think the same corruption can and will happen with AI models. Right now we're in this phase of, like, Anthropic is supposed to be the good guys who are neutral and don't want to make killing robots for the government, whereas opening eyes, like, we're going to follow the,

the government and do whatever and, you know, chase profit as much as we can. But neither of them are good. Like, neither are following a sense of human good that I believe in. I wonder if we can cast ourselves, like, five years in the future to where we'll be with all of this. Because we've formed sort of a parisocial relationship with these bots, and we ask them for recommendations the way we would ask a friend or a bookseller or a critic for recommendations. And I wonder, where does that leave us? five, 10 years from now. I think if the user actions right now

are any indication, people will be using chatbots a lot and kind of using them as a window to everything they're doing and consuming. So right now, like, we open our phones and go to lots of apps and see lots of things. But I think in the future it'll just be your AI model, like Chad GPT or Anthropic. And then that's kind of the window through which

you'll see other stuff, whether it's like a YouTube channel or a book recommendation or your faux-romantic relationship with a robot. I would also recommend having the New York Times app on your phone. Yes, exactly. But I think the AI model will be your guide to everything else, and thus it influences everything you do. And in that world where sort of everything that you experience now

as multiple different apps on your phone or as a search engine is instead a singular AI model who is giving you information, what impact does that have on how we develop our sense of taste? and how we experience culture. To me, it feels more homogenous. I mean, I think a lot of users are pretty passive, and they kind of identify with the first layer of what they interact with. So it'll be like you don't consume music through Spotify.

You consume it through chat GPT. Like you see an artist's stuff, their music, their paintings, whatever, through the chat bot. And so you associate that culture with the chat bot itself. And I think that's, I don't know, it feels yucky to me. And it's like you're saying it feels like it's your friend. Like that's one of the weirder parts of it. Like it feels like it's your buddy that has everything in it at the same time.

And it remembers you. Like this is one of the most shocking experiential parts of it to me. Like they build up memories of what you've told it and your preferences and your the things that you rely on. As part of researching this, I asked Claude, who is the most beautiful woman. And it told me that it didn't experience faces. But then it was like, Tilda Swinton and Lupida Njango. And I was like, my Claude knows I'm gay.

I wonder what happens. I wonder what happens if I ask generic Claude. So I opened, I like created a new Claude account. And I prompted it in exactly the same way. I used exactly the same language. And it said Audrey Hepburn. That's so interesting. It's modulating based on your own taste, like what the ideal is.

And I think we're just so unaware of those biases. In addition to the biases in the model, but that's a hyper-specific way that it's filtering, like, culture and everything back to you via what you've told it before. And what impact do you think it will have in a world where instead of a for-you page on Instagram, sort of everything is going through Claude or chatGBT B.T five years from now? I think, again, it's just that hyper-hyper optimization towards what you already like and the feeling that it's being fed back to you by this kind of, friendly entity who knows you based on what you've told them already. And then do we also see a convergence of these two things of like it being everything you can seem is mediated through the app on your phone that is your AI app. But then you're also through that app consuming video that's created by AI. Like is there any outside to this world? That is like the snake eating its own

tail, I guess. I think in the AI company's aspirations, there is no outside. Like they would love to create this purely AI bubble where it tells you what to consume and produces what you consume at the same time. And that would be the most profitable, efficient ecosystem for an open AI or an anthropic to create. But what like, I think the problem with that is that there is then no mechanism for humans making anything. Like, they are betting everything on the AI being good enough that it's smarter than a human. I can do and create better things than a human. So we're going to find out, I guess. But if there's no incentive for humans to make stuff, if there's no economic function for it,

I really worry that the cultural ecosystem and the information ecosystem will just get degraded very quickly. But I do think, like, culture always lives. Like, there's always a new thing happening, and there's some artists working in their basement doing some crazy thing. And I don't know, I do have hope that, like, a human artist always has that urge to make something new. Yeah, and I believe that, too, even outside of the... I mean, the economic model. Economic models for culture are terrible, but people still make it and have always made music and art. I believe that that will persist.

It's like a very, very deep human urge, but we're making it a lot harder for no good reason, as I see it. Can you be prescriptive? What can someone listening who feels the anxieties about all of the things that we've talked about, about the flattening of culture, about AI, taking over, about our own taste, coming sort of more and more simply the easiest, most basic versions of ourselves reflected back at us. What specifically can you do on an individual level to keep making an argument within yourself and within the world for things that surprise and risk and challenge you? I love the question. It's like a discipline that we all have to practice every day

to separate our taste and our identity from the feed or the, AI model or just from our screens. And to be like, no, that's not me. Like that my phone is not my entire identity. And I don't know. I find that, I mean, there's different ways to go off the rails for yourself, I think. Like you can explore the internet beyond what is fed to you directly by your feed. You can delve into a rabbit hole on Spotify or on YouTube.

Like you can explore within these ecosystems. And I think you can just go offline. Like, you can go to MoMA and look at a weird painting, or you can go to any art museum and not just go to the most famous piece of work or the most famous object, but just kind of wander around and experience something that you don't understand yet and just sit there and feel if you are gravitating towards something or not. No, no, no. It feels like a meditative practice to me a little bit to just exist and see what moves you. And that's something that we don't get the chance to do on our phones because they're just bombarding us with new stuff all the time. And I feel like in addition to like, yeah, like kind of like being more open to randomness, there's also like the depth factor. Like I think it's so rewarding to go so deep on one specific thing.

Like read like all the novels by Elizabeth Bowen, who is like a mid-century writer who I don't think has had like the critical renaissance that many of her peers have. Like just read them all and see what happens. and you will be rewarded for kind of deep attention and like focusing hard on like one specific thing or one specific area. Like be more like a collector. Be more like open to the idea that like, yeah, the depth and narrowness will reward you rather than kind of like broad consumption of everything. Always being aware of like what's in the New York Times book review. Just like, yeah, follow your own kind of eccentric path, I think. And that's too.

And that's the same way. You don't have to chase everything. You can chase what fascinates you. Sophie, Kyle, thank you so much for talking about this with me. It was so nice to just get to air all of my biggest anxieties about AI and the culture at you. I feel inspired and hopeful. I also feel inspired and hopeful. Yeah, we left it on a good note. Great. This entire episode is also available on YouTube. If you want to see Kyle wearing a chore coat, check us. out on YouTube at New York Times Opinion. If you like this show, follow it on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur,

Veshaca Darba, Victoria Chamberlain and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Jillian Weinberger, Jasmine Romero, and Kari Pitkin. Mixing by Carol Sabro. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro,

Team Shapiro and Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. The head of operations is Shannon Busta. Audience support by Christina Samuelski. The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.