Ending AI Slop — Thais Castello Branco, Taste Labs
Jul 31, 2026 · 16:30
Thais Castello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, argues AI slop persists because subjective domains like design and writing lack the verifiability of code, and ending it requires decomposing taste into measurable components and building preference data that breaks from the mean. She sorts domains along a spectrum from things that verify and execute cleanly to pure preference with no ground truth, showing how brand adherence becomes trainable by decomposing a brand into colors, typography, motion, and textures graded against an original rather than judged whole. She warns that models predicting the most likely outcome collapse to the mean, killing the creativity good design depends on, so Taste Labs works with over 1,000 expert designers to force distribution and create preference vectors that capture pluralism. Her team pairs expert judgment with human QA tied to specific code components, distinguishing disagreement on alignment from disagreement on style, and advocates quality over quantity for subjective domains.
