Can AI have taste? That was the hot topic at Replit's NYC vibe-coding conference.

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What's "taste" got to do with it?

At Vibecon, a conference bringing together "creatives and AI," it felt like everything came back to "taste."

The two-day conference was put on by the buzzy vibe-coding company Replit at a downtown New York City venue.

Amjad Masad, Replit's CEO, addressed the conference in his afternoon remarks and threw on a New York Knicks hat. Later, he sat down with filmmaker Spike Jonze to discuss the creative process and Jonze's film "Her" — a movie about a relationship a man forms with an AI bot. (While "Her" is fictional and was released in 2013, it certainly feels timely and a little too real now.)

Their fireside chat was titled aptly: "Everyone's a creative. Now what?"

Masad asked Jonze about his own taste and if taste was "innate" or "learnable."

Jonze's response: "It's your person, your personality, that is what your taste is."

What is taste, anyway?

If you've read the word taste too many times already in this article, I regret to inform you that you're only going to hear more about this new buzzword.

Earlier this week, Taste Labs announced an $18.5 million seed funding round, with the mission of giving AI better taste. Tech executives like OpenAI's Sam Altman, as well as business school professors, are declaring taste a crucial competency for the AI era.

The problem is that no one has an amazing answer to the question of what taste is. And people can (and have) endlessly debated what good or poor taste looks like, and what's high or lowbrow.

Masad told me offstage at the day's after-party that "we need to sit with the question a little bit," rather than jumping to answers. That's what Replit was, in part, trying to do by hosting Vibecon in NYC.

While there were the typical conference lanyards, workshops, and a lineup of guest speakers, the whole shebang was very much trying to brush elbows with the art world. There were interactive art exhibits, artist talks, and a listening room with speakers from Silence Please (which runs its own listening room venue in NYC).

My brain just doesn't work like this

At one of Vibecon's talks, Kyle McDonald, an artist and programmer, showcased several AI-driven projects to a room of fellow vibe coders. One project included AI-generated whale sounds. Another piece, called "Blind Self Portrait," has people make a self-portrait with their eyes closed using computer vision algorithms.

I tested out the latter. The first time around, I was told I was too tense. Later in the evening, McDonald gave me a more robust tutorial, and I tried to relax. The second take definitely came out better.

At one point during the day, after listening to artists like McDonald explain how they go from idea to vibe coding projects into existence, I wrote down a note for myself: My brain just doesn't work like this.

There are a lot of creative ways to use AI — including many ways I could have never dreamed up myself. Will everything that people make with it be good? No. Cool? Sometimes.

One conference-goer, Michelle Hui, described the event in a post to X as "AI 'designer' taste-slop personified." I scrolled past her post while listening to a fireside chat between Replit president Michele Catasta and Anthropic's Meaghan Choi, the head of design for Claude Code.

I spoke with Hui in more depth about taste, and she said she thought the vibes at Vibecon felt a little "off." The venue felt like an AI-generated mood board, she said.

For his part, Masad said that his company drew inspiration from the "energy" of New York, where he lived before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area.

"We try to bring that into our company," Masad said. "The culture, the galleries, the music, the art, the food, the fashion."

Let me take you into the day (and night) at Vibecon

The guest list: Vibe coders, classically trained software engineers, esoteric artists, musicians, filmmakers, and content creators. I spotted one guy in the crowd who had recently graduated from high school. I also spotted actor Ramy Youssef. Tickets for most people cost $100 (Business Insider was given a press pass).
The moment: At one workshop, I finally learned how to vibe code. I used Replit to make a very poor-quality mock-up of a mobile game and a black-and-white photobooth until I ran out of credits.

The quote: "Let's all take a big breath," Jonze said at the end of his session. He guided the crowd through some audible breath work and let out a roaring sigh.