Marketplace Tech · Thursday, August 13, 2026
Critic and journalist Sophie Hackney argues that true taste is fundamentally human and deeply connected to embodiment and lived experience, making it something AI cannot replicate. She suggests AI can only mimic or catch up, rather than authentically create or discover.
“And so I wonder how you solve that problem of how you respond to stimuli in our environment if you're not responding really to stimuli.”
“I do think that's really different from taste because if what they're doing is is simply curating kind of quote unquote better data sets or averaging different kinds of people's preferences, you're still in that that problem of the average. And you're still not, I think, producing something that has its own taste.”
“Um, and so I think AI is not embodied. Whether or not you think it has consciousness, I don't. It certainly doesn't have a body. And so I wonder how you solve that problem of how you respond to stimuli in our environment if you're not responding really to stimuli.”
“It certainly has made me think a lot more about, you know, what taste is and to come to, I think a more humanistic perspective on it, because I really just am not convinced that you can teach a machine to have taste.”