If you have been paying attention to the AI rhetoric these days, you will have likely heard a lot of people talk about ‘taste’.
I myself started seeing this concept being banded around for a while, and an increasing amount at the beginning of the year with all the craze around Claude Code.
Claude Code opens the door for everyone to build (almost) anything. And this opportunity is not just available to those who know how to code - you simply need natural language to get going. Explain what you want built, and the coding agent will do the rest.
But with AI taking away the expense and friction of execution, focus has now moved to the other parts of problem-solving with code. Because in a world where you can now build (almost) anything, what matters more than ever is building the right thing in the right way.
And this got me thinking; there seems to be such a thing as having good taste in AI development and deployment, which I do think is genuinely important. But what about having good taste when it comes AI governance? Is there even such a thing?
Initially, I thought this was a silly idea. Taste connotes creativity, imagination and novelty. These are not words that people think of when they think of governance. On the contrary they might instead think: onerous, tedious and a blocker.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that taste in governance is not only real, but crucial.
Governance without taste fulfils the dreary perception that most have about the field.
Governance with taste fulfils legal requirements but also helps unlock the full potential of AI.
Tasteful governance melts the idea that legal professionals are mere luddites who stifle products and demonstrates a way to balance the engineering and lawyerly incentives.
What tasteful governance actually means
For me, taste is essentially a filtering mechanism.
Over time, you accumulate various bits of knowledge from the work you do. You build an understanding of the different problems that you or your clients face as well as the appropriate solutions to them.
These problems and corresponding solutions are compressed into retrievable principles and samples that can be applied to new sets of problems you encounter later on.
Taste is therefore a way of deciding how to sample from that knowledge base. It is about selecting the learned principles and samples from previous work that are most appropriate for the present work.
This is how taste works in other domains too, whether it be music, movies or people. Of all the music one has listened to, of all the movies one has watched, and of all the people one has interacted with, they know how to pick well by using a learned criteria that helps distinguish between the good, the decent and the bad.
Taste is therefore the ability to pattern-match, abstract and see the signal in the noise in various situations based on past learnings.
To apply this to governance, taste is not just about knowing what the law says. That is the easier bit really. You look up the correct rules for a client’s given situation and interpret their meaning accurately.
It is the next bit where taste is important - knowing how to implement the rules. And this task requires creativity, context-sensitivity and commercial awareness to not merely come up with a solution, but the solution. That is tasteful governance in a nutshell.