At Vibecon, ‘taste’ became the AI problem everyone argued

Can AI – Replit’s two-day Vibecon in downtown New York City turned a buzzword into the day’s central fight: whether AI can be taught “taste” at all. CEO Amjad Masad sat down with filmmaker Spike Jonze about the creative process and Jonze’s film “Her,” while a parallel

In downtown New York City, the question wasn’t whether people can build with AI. It was whether AI can recognize what humans mean when they say “taste.”

Replit staged its two-day Vibecon conference for “creatives and AI” at a downtown New York City venue, and for most of the event the word kept echoing through conversations, workshops, and performances—sometimes like a promise, sometimes like a provocation.

Amjad Masad. Replit’s CEO. addressed the conference in his afternoon remarks and even put on a New York Knicks hat. Later, he sat down with filmmaker Spike Jonze for a fireside chat titled “Everyone’s a creative. Now what?” The discussion turned to the creative process and Jonze’s 2013 film “Her. ” which is about a relationship a man forms with an AI bot. While “Her” is fictional, its themes landed uncomfortably close to the moment.

Jonze pressed toward the personal side of taste. When Masad asked if taste was “innate” or “learnable,” Jonze responded: “It’s your person, your personality, that is what your taste is.”

That line hung over the conference, even as other parts of the event tried to make taste measurable in practice.

Earlier this week, Taste Labs announced an $18.5 million seed funding round, with a mission of giving AI better taste. Tech executives like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and business school professors have been declaring taste a crucial competency for the AI era. Yet at Vibecon. no one offered a clear. widely accepted definition of what taste actually is—what counts as good taste. what falls into highbrow or lowbrow. and who gets to decide.

Masad, speaking to me offstage at the day’s after-party, didn’t push for quick answers. “we need to sit with the question a little bit,” he said, rather than rushing toward conclusions. Hosting Vibecon in NYC was part of that attempt—an environment meant to let ideas rub against each other instead of settling into slogans.

The schedule reflected that intent. Alongside conference lanyards. workshops. and a lineup of guest speakers. Vibecon leaned hard into art-world proximity: interactive art exhibits. artist talks. and a listening room that included speakers from Silence Please. which runs its own listening room venue in NYC.

Still, not everyone felt the same emotional alignment between art and code.

Kyle McDonald, an artist and programmer, showcased AI-driven projects to fellow vibe coders during one of Vibecon’s talks. One project included AI-generated whale sounds. Another piece, “Blind Self Portrait,” asked people to make a self-portrait with their eyes closed using computer vision algorithms.

I tested “Blind Self Portrait.” The first time around, I was told I was too tense. Later in the evening, McDonald gave me a more robust tutorial, and I tried to relax. The second take came out better.

But the technical magic didn’t instantly translate into effortless creativity. After hearing McDonald explain how he moves from an idea to vibe coding projects, I scribbled a note for myself: “My brain just doesn’t work like this.”

The event made the point anyway—there are creative ways to use AI, including ones people might not invent on their own. But it also left open the question of quality. “Will everything that people make with it be good?” I wrote down. “No. Cool? Sometimes.”

That mixed reaction showed up in sharper form elsewhere. One conference-goer, Michelle Hui, described the event in a post to X as “AI ‘designer’ taste-slop personified.” Hui told me the vibes at Vibecon felt a little “off,” and said the venue felt like an AI-generated mood board.

Even Masad’s pitch for the event’s energy was rooted in human culture more than algorithmic certainty. He said Replit drew inspiration from the “energy” of New York. where he lived before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. “We try to bring that into our company,” Masad said. “The culture, the galleries, the music, the art, the food, the fashion.”.

If taste is tied to personality, then culture may matter as much as code—and the conference seemed to treat that idea as a live question rather than an answer.

The guest list at Vibecon spanned vibe coders, classically trained software engineers, esoteric artists, musicians, filmmakers, and content creators. I spotted one guy in the crowd who had recently graduated from high school. and I also spotted actor Ramy Youssef. Tickets for most people cost $100, and Business Insider was given a press pass.

The “moment” that captured the learning curve came during a workshop when I finally learned how to vibe code. I used Replit to make a very poor-quality mock-up of a mobile game and a black-and-white photobooth until I ran out of credits.

The sensory push didn’t stop there. At one point, Jonze guided the crowd at the end of his session with a breath ritual. “Let’s all take a big breath,” he said, guiding the crowd through some audible breath work and then letting out a roaring sigh.

But for me, the day ended with friction of a different kind. I was overstimulated—so overstimulated. I also spent over $50 on snacks and beverages during the day.

By the night’s end. the conference had delivered what its title promised: a world where everyone is a creative. and the tools feel immediate. Yet the central debate stayed unresolved. Taste was at the center of the conversation—from the $18.5 million seed round for Taste Labs to Jonze’s insistence that taste lives in personhood—and in the gaps between the demos and the critiques. the real problem emerged: no one had a clean. universally shared definition of what “good taste” even means in the first place.

Replit Vibecon taste AI Taste Labs seed funding Amjad Masad Spike Jonze Her Anthropic Claude Code Kyle McDonald computer vision vibe coding Silence Please Michelle Hui Sam Altman design