{"slug": "ageusia-the-loss-of-taste-in-the-ai-internet", "title": "Ageusia – The Loss of Taste in the AI Internet", "summary": "The removal of technical barriers to creating online content has eliminated a key mechanism through which taste was developed, leading to what is being called \"Ageusia\" — a state where generated work shows competence but no evidence of personal choice or conviction. As AI tools make production effortless, creators can skip the process of deciding what they actually want, resulting in pages, apps, and writing that function correctly but feel unchosen. This phenomenon, visible first in AI images with their telltale flaws and now across text and video, represents a shift from incompetence as the internet's failure mode to competence without conviction.", "body_md": "For a long time, the hard part of making things on the internet was making them at all.\n\nIf you wanted a website, you learned HTML and CSS. If you wanted it to do something, you learned JavaScript. If you wanted good pictures or designs, you learned to use the right apps or a camera.\n\nThat difficulty produced a certain kind of internet. Not necessarily good, but largely intentional. The imperfections proved that every choice was actually a choice, they might have been wrong, but they had decided.\n\nNow that friction is vanishing.\n\nand honestly, it’s genuinely great. Founders test ideas in hours, people can build what once required small teams and more people have access to build what they want than at any point in history.\n\nBut when one constraint disappears, another reveals itself.\n\nThe conventional version of this argument says: the old bottleneck was skill, the new bottleneck is taste.\n\nThat is true, but it flattens something important. Skill acquisition was often a path to taste. Learning something well enough to use it meant caring enough to have a destination. The two were hard to separate.\n\nWhat we have removed is not just the bottleneck before taste. We have removed one of the mechanisms through which taste was built in the first place.\n\nThat is much stranger, and much more unsettling, than the clean succession implies.\n\nThe failure mode of the AI internet is not incompetence. Incompetence is easy to dismiss.\n\nIt is competence without conviction - pages that look like pages, apps that function like apps, writing that reads like writing. Nothing is technically wrong, but nothing feels chosen either. It shows that a plausible first output is accepted and shipped before anyone has to develop an opinion.\n\nI have started calling this **Ageusia.**\n\nIn medicine, it refers to a rare condition that causes the complete loss of taste. On the internet, I think it describes something adjacent: not the innate inability to judge, but the absence of feeling any need to.\n\nWhen generation feels effortless, you can skip the part where you decide what you actually want.\n\nAnd that part, it turns out, was the most load-bearing all along.\n\nI spent the past couple weeks trying to trace back when this became visible for me.\n\nThe first time this became visible to me wasn’t writing. We could all spot that with the em-dashes, the “not just X but Y” and other tells.\n\nIt was AI images.\n\nWhen they arrived, they felt like magic. A person could externalize an image from their head without technical training.\n\nBut then we started noticing - the hands, the teeth, the yellow filter over everything. Not just researchers or early adopters, but everyone who had seen enough: grandparents, kids, people who had never thought about color grading in their lives.\n\nThe websites with the blurple gradient, the rounded cards, the single glowing button. An over-explained hero section with the same floating dashboard mockup and the same names in the testimonials.\n\nThen AI video - I remember downloading Sora clips from Twitter because it was hard to access. When I found them again months later, I couldn’t believe they had ever fooled me. The physics looked soft. The motion was off and The audio sync wasn’t great.\n\nEach time, the cycle repeated: a capability arrived, people used it indiscriminately because they could, novelty eroded, and what seemed impressive became recognizable.\n\nWe are a species that survived by noticing anomalies. Pattern recognition is not expertise-dependent. It just needs exposure.\n\nWhat we were recognizing wasn’t bad taste. It was the absence of taste: work that carried no proof of preference, no evidence that anyone had been there making decisions.\n\nThis brings me to the question most writing about AI and creativity skips past.\n\nWhat is taste, and where does it come from?\n\nIt’s easy to say taste matters now. It’s harder to say what that means.\n\nTaste is not aesthetics. It is not preferring minimalism or bold typography or a particular shade of red. Those are preferences. Taste is something harder: the ability to hold your own criteria steady while facing an infinite number of options. Knowing what you want well enough to recognize it when it appears. Knowing what you don’t want well enough to refuse it even when what’s in front of you is impressive, plausible, close enough.\n\nIf that sounds simple. It isn’t.\n\nWhen it took four hours to build a header, you lived with that header long enough to develop feelings about it. When you rewrote a sentence not because it was wrong but because it didn’t sound like yourself, a judgment you couldn’t have made last week, before you’d stared at the alternatives.\n\nThe machines producing those outputs have no criterion of their own - by default they’re trained to predict the most probable next token without nuance, preference or texture. When you use AI tools, your criterion is often the only one in the room and that’s often the hardest realization.\n\nThere is a cynical view that AI content (or slop) will flood everything and people will simply accept it because it is cheap.\n\nI don’t believe this - and this is not naive optimism speaking, it’s because I’ve watched the internet run this cycle multiple times.\n\nPeople tolerated autoplay music and spinning GIFs when the web was new. Then enough people experienced enough bad pages that a collective standard emerged.\n\nThe same thing happened with pop-up ads, Flash intros, skeuomorphic design, and every trend that overstayed its welcome.\n\nWhenever a new capability arrives, people use it indiscriminately because they can. But as novelty erodes and what once seemed exciting becomes legible, the only people who survive the filter are the ones who were using the capability with intent from the beginning.\n\nWe are in the indiscriminate phase, this is what ageusia looks like at scale with a flood of plausible outputs arriving before anyone has learned how to refuse them.\n\nBut the collective palate is adjusting, as it always has.\n\nSome of the most interesting work I have seen made with AI came from people who brought a strong opinion into the room and used the tool to realize it faster - these are also the people I’ve seen being hired or build great things fast. The tool is exceptional, the problem is treating generation as creation and mistaking the presence of an output for the presence of a choice.\n\nI largely believe taste is not a gift - it is the residue of everything you have made and studied and rejected and admired and abandoned, compressed into instinct.\n\nIn a world where anyone can generate anything, taste is the only reliable signal that someone was there.\n\nThe old internet rewarded effort because effort was scarce. The new internet will reward taste because output is infinite.\n\nWithout experiencing enough, not wanting enough - I don’t know what that produces. I don’t think anyone does.\n\nAnd taste, in the end, is just the proof that someone was there and cared enough to look at what they made and said “not yet.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ageusia-the-loss-of-taste-in-the-ai-internet", "canonical_source": "https://kuber.studio/blog/Reflections/Ageusia", "published_at": "2026-05-30 13:55:13+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-30 14:07:43.242292+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "ai-products", "ai-ethics"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ageusia-the-loss-of-taste-in-the-ai-internet", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ageusia-the-loss-of-taste-in-the-ai-internet.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ageusia-the-loss-of-taste-in-the-ai-internet.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ageusia-the-loss-of-taste-in-the-ai-internet.jsonld"}}