Artificial intelligence tools have made it incredibly easy to produce a bad essay, short story, video, or image. Such low quality output is generally referred to as “slop.”

The internet is awash with slop. Merriam-Webster chose “slop” as its 2025 Word of the Year, observing: “Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything.” (RELATED: Artificial Intelligence May Change American Healthcare Forever, Study Suggests)

Enter: Taste Labs, an AI startup which came “out of stealth” Tuesday with $18.5 million in seed funding. Taste Labs’ mission is ending “AI slop.”

“We want a future where AI understands what feels right. What fits, what’s beautiful, what feels like you, what is truly great,” says Taste Labs founder Thais Castello Branco in her announcement video. “Today, those decisions live inside human judgment. They’re difficult to explain, difficult to measure, which is why it’s been so hard for AI to become great at these subjective domains. We’re building the foundation to measure, judge, codify, and search over what ‘great’ means in domains where there’s not a clear right answer.”

Castello Branco has identified a problem, but I’m doubtful that her startup will provide the solution to that problem. 

When taste is fully automated it ceases to function as taste https://t.co/abSmIR5v28

— Emily Segal (@khole_emily) June 16, 2026

What is taste?

Taste originates in the senses. In Vulgar Latin, “tastare” meant “to touch or feel.” That is to say, taste is rooted in individual perception. There are principles of design, but complete knowledge of those principles does not equate to “taste.” Taste suggests personal discernment, as Castello Branco notes.

There is beauty and there is ugliness, but “good taste” does not necessarily refer to one’s ability to distinguish the two. Taste is, at least in part, a social game. A person with “good taste” adopts trends early, then drops them when they become passé. An example: People with good taste know that visual art which is immediately, strikingly pleasant is actually bad art, and that the best art is broadly unappealing and accessible to only a few chosen viewers.

The mass production of a thing tends to devalue it. This is the basis of Rob Henderson’s theory of “luxury beliefs“: Mass production destroyed the signaling value of luxury goods, so the elite and aspiring-elite turned to adopting expensive beliefs. (RELATED: Half Of Americans Now Afraid They’ll Lose Their Jobs To AI)

The mass production of a thing does not automatically make it ugly, nor does scarcity automatically make something beautiful. If you live in an area with few cockroaches, you still wouldn’t be delighted to see one in your kitchen.

If Taste Labs initially succeeds in its quest to end AI slop, their newfound “taste” will itself become slop. And so on.