Culture & Code for 4 June 2025
Creativity and Artificial Intelligence
This is Culture & Code, a weekly newsletter and podcast about Creativity and Artificial Intelligence. Culture & Code explores innovation across storytelling, technology and audiences to help creative professionals collaborate better with AI and each other.
What is taste in an AI powered world?
Creative taste is the core act of authorship in an AI-powered media world. As creators gain new powers with AI, audiences develop new expectations in parallel. Together, AI creators and their audiences are redefining the role and value added by taste.
Taste is multifaceted and contextual
Taste expresses itself on physical, perceptual, and social levels.
Biological human taste begins with the tongue detecting chemical signatures in food and drink. But even before reaching the mouth, physical taste is influenced by smell, temperature, and texture. Physical taste is also shaped by how food is presented. A good cook arranges food to please the mental palette of the diner, which can cause a physical reaction captured in phrases like “it looks mouth watering”.
Then, there is the immediate environment. A tuna sandwich served at a picnic versus a restaurant versus an airport is a different experience even if it’s the same sandwich. Finally, there is the social environment, as expressed in architectural design, staffing, service and clientele, not to mention whether a person is eating with a loved one, an old friend, or someone they loath but must keep up appearances.
Whether hand-made or AI-generated, media too exhibits a similar structure. There is a physical sensory layer of images, sounds, and smells that touch individuals and audiences like flavor touches the tongue. There is a presentation layer that guides the media experience (ex. a movie theater vs. a broadway theater). Finally, there is ambiance—the platform, the setting, the other people who experience the media or performance with you.
So at its root, creative taste isn’t just about understanding the properties of what’s being served. Taste is an author’s understanding of how a creative work should land with an audience. AI doesn’t change people’s appreciation of good taste. AI changes how creators express good taste.
From scarcity to curation
In the 20th century, media creation was shaped by expensive tools and hard won craft knowledge. Whether someone wrote, composed, painted, filmed or whatever, their creative taste was expressed via what could be developed and distributed under significant constraints of talent, time and resources. Simultaneously, those constraints helped draw clear lines between professional and amateur media, not to mention the distribution power of gatekeepers who filtered what audiences accessed.
The Internet and social media democratized distribution. Now, AI democratizes the creation side of the coin. Creators can generate dialogue, compose a score, generate images and animation, design effects, or edit footage with tools that require more intuition than instruction. The creation and production economics of AI generated media have blown a gaping hole in the institutional walls that previously separated professional from amateur media.
Audiences have changed, too. People today seek a point-of-view even more. In world of deep fakes, AI twins, and chatbots; flesh and blood humans hunger for stories that feels like they came from someone. Audiences want to be moved, not just dazzled. They notice when something is off—when a scene looks good but feels hollow. They reward creators who make thoughtful choices that respect their attention.
As a result, the defining act in an AI powered media world is curation more than creation. Taste is eclipsing technology as the flywheel for the creative economy.
Taste is the currency of trust
Taste communicates: “I’ve paid attention, made choices, and love this work. I believe you will too.” When AI can generate most anything, taste will be the human fingerprint that gives a creative work its meaning and value.
Taste is not just a mark of style. Taste expresses the trust between a creator and their audiences. It’s how creators stand out, and how audiences find something memorable and worth sharing.
In that sense, taste will remain a profoundly human endowment that AI won’t duplicate for the foreseeable future.
C&C Conversation with Rachel Joy Victor of FBRC.ai
In our latest Culture & Code episode, we sit down with Rachel Joy Victor, co-founder of FBRC.ai, to examine how AI reshapes media pipelines and empowers creators. Rachel shares what it means to build “flexible pipelines” and why control over camera, scene, and actor is critical for the future of visual storytelling.
Rachel and I spoke at the Creative Control Hackathon—a bold experiment in using generative AI to return power to filmmakers.
🎧 Listeners will learn:
Why narrative consistency is a big challenge in AI filmmaking
How spatial computing and data-driven design can personalize entire worlds
The skills every creative professional should develop now—not later
Whether you're in film, design, gaming, or just curious where AI meets storytelling, this episode delivers ideas you’ll want to act on.
👉 Listen to the full conversation HERE.
AI Movie Night during Seattle Tech Week July 30
This will be an ongoing announcement each week.
The Seattle AI Film Festival (SAIFF) will host AI Movie Night during Seattle Tech Week on July 30, 2025.
We’ll curate 4 category winning AI short films with comment and presentations from award winning AI creators and technologists about filmmaking as a craft and career under a new paradigm. The audience will be exposed to top rated short films made with AI plus insights and frameworks from the people making them.
What to expect at AI Movie Night:
- 4 World Class AI-powered short films
- Live commentary between films
- Special presentation from a leading creator/studio and creative AI tech company
- Networking at the center of Storytelling & AI
- Launch announcement of the SAIFF 24hr AI Film Challenge in late October 2025
If you’re a creator, a technologist, a strategist, or a fan, you can’t miss this opportunity to see the future and connect to a growing community of creative AI innovators.
Registration opens on June 23. You can check out the full lineup of events at the Seattle Tech Week lu.ma page.