Marketplace Tech · Thursday, August 13, 2026
According to critic and journalist Sophie Hackney, taste is a fundamentally human quality stemming from embodied experiences and a lifetime of attention and environmental interaction. She argues that AI, lacking a physical body and consciousness, cannot develop genuine taste, only mimicry.
“I also think it has to do sometimes with like our experience of being in our bodies. Like the way you respond to a painting is like an embodied experience. Is it a yuk or a yum? Right.”
“It's about the way we pay attention to things, the way we experience things. Um, it's sort of like the result of our whole experience of living in the physical world, um, and looking at, say, thousands of trees over the course of our lives and coming to develop a preference for a certain kind of tree.”
“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.”