Taste & Skill In Art

Or why ChatGPT's story telling ability sucks.

Welcome to Better Short - Ideas or stories expressed in 500 words or less.

Any good creative work combines two ingredients: Taste and Skill. When you enjoy a book, a film, or a piece of music, you respect the artist’s skill while resonating with their taste.

Taste is vibe. Skill is the execution.

Taste, in this context, doesn’t mean “tasteful” in the moral sense; it’s about alignment with an individual’s internal aesthetic.

The two are weakly correlated. You can develop one without the other, and the strong presence of one does not guarantee the other.

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Taste x Skill

1. Great Taste; No Skill: These are the curators, the critics and the connoisseurs. Example: An excellent movie critic who can’t make a film to save their life. Taste amplifies art by connecting creators to an audience that craves similar resonance. It’s important.

2. Great Skill; No Taste: This is the world of the dogged technicians who excel at mechanics but lack great taste. They could end up in either highly technical but low-taste stakes sections to manifest their skill (E.g. write technical documentation) or slog in a high-taste medium in obscurity (Aspire to be a great novelist).

3. Great Taste and Skill This is where popular creators thrive: authors, filmmakers, musicians, writers, designers, etc., who marry technical mastery with incredible taste. This does not guarantee success but is a minimum requirement.

4. Neither Taste Nor Skill: Irrelevant.

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Developing Taste

Taste evolves through consumption and reflection. Watch enough movies, read enough books, admire enough paintings, and you’ll start to notice patterns in what speaks to you. Taste isn’t universal—you might have a refined palate for theatre but find poetry utterly opaque. That’s fine. Not all art forms will resonate equally.

Example: I’ve never cultivated a taste for poetry. I haven’t read enough of it nor reflected on why certain poems might appeal to me. On the other hand, I’ve developed strong tastes in cinema, storytelling, and visual aesthetics.

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Developing Skill

Skill is forged in the fire of creation. You cannot consume your way to skill. You write better by writing, and you film better by filming.

Some aspiring creators falter when they confuse proximity to art with the act of building skill.

Example: Quentin Tarantino talks about his time working in a movie rental store as a period when he was sleeping. Surrounded by movies and discussing them, he thought he was on the path to becoming a filmmaker. Eventually, he realized he was deluding himself. To become a movie maker, he had to make movies.

We often fall into this trap. We hope to be creators, orbit the art we love, and become excellent curators or critics, but we never venture into creation.

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Developing Both Taste and Skill

To develop both, creators must consume and create simultaneously. Writers must read, and filmmakers must watch films. There is no shortcut. Taste is refined through consumption, followed by applying that filter to your creation. Your creation informs your consumption choices and taste—a virtuous circle.

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ChatGPT and Writing

ChatGPT’s writing skills are impressive. It generates coherent plots, builds consistent characters, and seamlessly connects narrative threads. I’d rate its skill a solid 7/10.

Its taste is dismal (2/10). The stories are in the uncanny valley—technically correct but emotionally off. They lack the ineffable spark that makes art resonate.

Of course, not all content requires taste. Emails, LinkedIn posts, and dry essays are functional outputs where skill suffices. But fiction? Stories? That’s where taste becomes indispensable.

The day LLMs master taste is when they begin crafting fiction that genuinely resonates.

Or they could flood the world with tasteless junk that recalibrates our collective taste.

Better Short,

Tyag