AI Has No Taste

Fashion editorial by Alessia Moccia featuring a model with zebras at sunset, combining cinematic photography and generative image-making in “AI Has No Taste.”

It can generate beauty in seconds. Knowing when something is wrong is a different skill.

This week I spent hours trying to make a zebra look right.

Not anatomically right. That was easy.

Fashion right.

And that's a completely different problem.

I was working on a fashion film and something wasn't working. The zebra was beautiful. The image was beautiful. The light was beautiful.

I hated it.

So I changed the angle. The lens. The saturation. The movement. The distance from the subject. I made it less perfect, more accidental, more photographic.

Still wrong.

This happens to me constantly with AI.

The machine can give me an extraordinary image in seconds, but it doesn't know that something feels cheap. It doesn't know when skin is too perfect, when a pose looks like advertising instead of fashion, when a beautiful light is actually a boring light.

It doesn't know when an image has taste.

And perhaps more importantly, it doesn't know when to say no.

Photography taught me that making images isn't only about creating things. A huge part of it is rejecting them.

When you've spent years looking at fashion photography, something happens almost before you can explain it intellectually.

You know.

The hand is wrong.

The woman is too aware of being beautiful.

The light is too polite.

The composition is trying too hard.

The imperfection that should have been left in has been corrected.

Or everything is simply too perfect.

And perfection is surprisingly easy to forget.

This is where I think the conversation about AI and creativity sometimes becomes too obsessed with what AI can make.

I'm more interested in what it cannot recognize.

AI has access to an enormous visual culture, but access is not taste.

Taste comes from looking. From living. From remembering an image you saw in a magazine when you were twelve without even knowing why it stayed with you. From photography, cinema, paintings, bad movies, beautiful women on the street, ugly hotel rooms, mistakes, desire, embarrassment.

From thousands of tiny decisions accumulated over a lifetime.

AI can generate the zebra.

It cannot tell me whether the zebra belongs in my world.

That is still my job.

And perhaps that's why I don't think the most interesting question is whether AI will replace photographers.

The more interesting question is:

What happens when everyone can make a beautiful image?

Maybe beauty becomes the easy part.

And taste becomes everything.