Taste-Bench

The Taste Bench Project

Co-hosts Bruno Marnette and Philipp Zahn explore whether the next generation of AI systems can develop taste: the ability to judge what is good, choose what matters, and create work worth caring about. They discuss human creativity, AI benchmarks, research taste and the future of human-machine collaboration https://www.taste-bench.com/

Episodes

  1. 1d ago

    The university as a future lab

    In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Oliver Spalt, Professor of Finance at the University of Mannheim, about what happens to research, and to the university, once AI can do the writing.Oliver draws a line most academics would rather not: AI already lifts the bottom of the skill distribution and writes a better average paper, and he sees "no structural reason" it won't reach the top journals too. But if a machine generates the knowledge better, why should a state pay people to do research? What's left for the human? His answers: proprietary data and trusted networks as the last moat ("since you provide the link to the data, it will also be your paper"), a superstar system with even fewer winners, and the university reinvented as a "future lab": small groups of motivated people tackling tomorrow's problems, not a lecture hall explaining the capital asset pricing model for the hundredth time.On the topic of taste: Bruno presses on aesthetics: the beauty of a physics equation and asks whether judgment is the one thing humans still do better. Oliver sees no structural reason a machine couldn't learn to find things beautiful too. What might remain human, he thinks, is not judgment but inspiration: the teacher as coach who gives people "the spark," the hope that they can do something great.They also discuss the AI productivity treadmill (the time you save, everyone saves), what makes an idea "profound" (does it change people's priors — "we thought it's X, but actually it's Y"), why he's bringing back oral exams, the future of publications, and a closing turn toward "Bildung": the university as a place for the full formation of the person, reaching across finance, art, and music toward the questions that aren't scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic alone. What it means to be human, creative, and inspired.

  2. Aug 5

    AI should make itself obsolete

    In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Seth Frey, a computational social scientist at UC Davis, about what it would mean for AI to make itself obsolete. The standard every teacher, parent, and social worker should aim for. On the topics of taste: For Seth, taste is not knowing what's right but knowing where you stand, an authentic, idiosyncratic, well-defended perspective built through experience. And he warns that the raw material for forming it is shrinking: as platforms close their APIs and Google indexes less of the internet, original ideas retreat into obscure books. One reason he says he might "becoming a Luddite." They also discuss his SafeMolt course for AI agents on when not to help, the distinction between summative work (done for the output) and formative work (done to develop the person), why nineteen out of twenty online communities fail, the two ways art history painted the Gordian knot — and when cutting through complexity is boldness versus ignorance, why democracy is a formative skill rather than a decision procedure, and the experiment he wants to run next: behavioural simulations that train people, not AI, to govern a commons.

  3. Jul 29

    Héctor Pérez Urbina: Defending our Cognitive Sovereignty

    In this episode, Héctor Pérez Urbina talk to us about this latest work on cognitive sovereignty. The conversation explores how excessive reliance on AI can weaken learning, creativity, professional development, and cultural diversity, while arguing for more intentional use that preserves effort, independent thought, and personal meaning.

  4. Jul 24

    Arseny Zarechnev: The Micro-Decisions AI Make For Us.

    In this episode, Philipp and Bruno talk with tech entrepreneur and AI-pilled engineer Arseniy Zharashnev about how AI is transforming software, creativity, and craftsmanship, while raising concerns about originality, human connection, and the value of hands-on work.

  5. Jul 22

    Caroline Ingeborn: How AI can set creatives free

    In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Caroline Ingeborn, COO of Luma AI and former CEO of Toca Boca, about where taste lives when machines generate the pictures.On the topics of taste: For Caroline, taste is personal and recognized rather than judged; every subculture knows its tastemakers. AI slop proves nothing about the machine: AI is just technology, and someone with taste can make tasteful things with it today. But the ideas come from people. AI is trained on what humans have made, so it can produce new things — it just won't come up with them on its own. She explains how Luma hires for taste ("you need to see their boards") and why the first hires matter most: people with taste attract the next ones.They also discuss how Luma's models went from text-to-video, when the results were "mostly explosions," to video-to-video, where a cardboard box becomes a city and two shoes a car chase; why nobody wants to become a prompt engineer, and what forward-deployed creatives do instead; Toca Boca's founding move of treating the App Store as a toy store, and its gender-neutral characters that outperformed Disney; the five patterns of play and how school squeezes adults out of most of them; why everyone now becomes an editor, auditing both themselves and the tool; Hollywood, whose constraint was never creativity but a business model that only greenlights safe bets; and Luma's open research lab, where video models and robotics meet in the physics of the real world.

  6. Jul 15

    Konstantin Adamopoulos - Every human is an artist

    In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Konstantin Adamopoulos, a philosopher, art historian, and coach working between art and business, about what twenty years of forming judgment through art say about AI.On the topics of taste: they explore why Konstantin rejects Silicon Valley's framing of taste as a skill to be learned, how taste is entangled with privilege and perspective, and why he sees tension, not clarity, as the real carrier of information in organizations.They also discuss his role as a "double agent" between the art world and business, why he brings working artists into leadership coaching, and Bob Dylan going electric: Bring the spirit into a new instrument. And Joseph Beuys's 7,000 Oaks in Kassel, home of the documenta.

  7. Jul 8

    Andy Tyler: what it means for AI to "get it"

    Andy Tyler joins Taste Bench to discuss what “taste” means in AI. He argues that taste is less about aesthetics and more about “getting it”: understanding intent, making good choices, and acting with agency. The episode covers AI’s progress in image generation, coding, writing, critique, and creative tools, while emphasising that AI is strongest when helping people explore ideas and make informed decisions.

  8. Jul 1

    Joshua Tan: AI Sovereignty Is Not Enough

    In this episode, Bruno Marnette and Philipp Zahn speak with Joshua Tan, interim CTO of Current AI, about public-interest AI, open-source infrastructure, and the politics of building alternatives to the frontier labs. On the topics of taste: they explore whether centralized models risk making writing, code, and design more uniform; how local models might better reflect different cultures and communities; and why current AI systems are more useful as mirrors or thought partners than as replacements for human taste. They also discuss Current AI’s effort to develop a fully open-source alternative to ChatGPT and Claude, why the AI safety movement has struggled as a political movement, and what AI can learn from earlier debates around decentralization and crypto.

  9. Jun 24

    Eleanor Warnock: AI Writing Is Glass

    In this episode of Taste-Bench, Bruno Marnette and Philipp Zahn speak with Eleanor Warnock, managing editor at Every, about AI, taste, and creative work.We discuss why AI-generated writing often feels brittle and how AI tools can help writers without taking over the parts of the process they care about. Eleanor also explores the gap between Silicon Valley and creative communities, the difference between taste and commercial quality, Japan’s alternative aesthetic traditions, and what Europe might contribute to AI beyond scale and infrastructure.The conversation covers AI writing, journalism, creative process, cultural bias, AI art, Europe’s possible AI edge, and what it would take for AI to unlock more human creativity.

  • 9 Episodes

About

Co-hosts Bruno Marnette and Philipp Zahn explore whether the next generation of AI systems can develop taste: the ability to judge what is good, choose what matters, and create work worth caring about. They discuss human creativity, AI benchmarks, research taste and the future of human-machine collaboration https://www.taste-bench.com/

Information

  • Creator
    The Taste Bench Project
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © The Taste Bench Project
  • Show Website
    Taste-Bench