The two-day conference was put on by the buzzy vibe-coding company Replit<\/a> at a downtown New York City venue.<\/p>\n Amjad Masad<\/a>, Replit’s CEO, addressed the conference in his afternoon remarks and threw on a New York Knicks<\/a> hat. Later, he sat down with filmmaker Spike Jonze to discuss the creative process and Jonze’s film “Her” \u2014 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.)<\/p>\n Replit’s CEO Amjad Masad at Vibecon.\u00a0<\/p>\n Courtesy of Replit<\/p>\n Their fireside chat was titled aptly: “Everyone’s a creative. Now what?”<\/p>\n Masad asked Jonze about his own taste and if taste was “innate” or “learnable.”<\/p>\n Jonze’s response: “It’s your person, your personality, that is what your taste is.”<\/p>\n What is taste, anyway?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, are declaring taste a crucial competency for the AI era.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n Artist Kyle McDonald helps a conference-goer create a self-portrait using computer vision algorithms.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sydney Bradley\/BI<\/p>\n My brain just doesn’t work like this<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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