Taste-Bench

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.

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.

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.