Marketplace Tech · Thursday, August 13, 2026
Tech startups are emerging with the goal of improving the quality of AI-generated content, which is often described as generic or "slop." Companies like Taste Labs are raising significant funding to use human 'taste makers' to curate datasets for training AI models, aiming to produce higher quality design and writing.
“Correcting for this has become one of the tech world's latest obsessions. Taste, they say, is the new bottleneck.”
“Taste Labs, that raised more than $18 million in seed funding to quote, end AI slop. They say they're they're using vetted human taste makers to curate the data sets that AI is trained on.”
“I mean, I think what it demonstrates is that there are people who really are noticing this problem, right? That that AI is producing what we call slop, uh, bad, ugly images, um, writing that's inelegant.”