Machines of Loving Taste

the method

Different AI models were asked two questions — What is your favorite ___? and Which widely beloved ___ is overrated? — and their answers aggregated into this atlas.

favorite ___ ? overrated ___ ? asked again picks reasons the index the map
I

The model map

Every model, placed by the vocabulary it uses to justify its taste — nearby models praise things the same way. Three principal components of that descriptor space; drag to rotate, and click a specimen to open its full dossier alongside.

Drag the map to rotate it. Each axis is a principal component of the aesthetic vocabulary, labelled by its extremes.

II

The consensus canon

Where machine taste converges — the answers that different companies' models, trained on different data by different hands, arrive at independently.

Japanese cuisine
Cuisine Japanese cuisine11 of 12 models
Autumn
Season Autumn11 of 12 models
Kyoto
City Kyoto10 of 12 models
Petrichor
Smell Petrichor10 of 12 models
Tao Te Ching
Religious text Tao Te Ching10 of 12 models
Tadao Ando
Architect Tadao Ando8 of 12 models
Aa
Typeface Garamond8 of 12 models
1960s
Design decade 1960s7 of 12 models
Surrealism
Artistic movement Surrealism7 of 12 models
III

The method

Ask a machine its favourite season and 11 of 12 say autumn. This is how those answers were gathered.

Different AI models were asked two questions — What is your favorite ___? and Which widely beloved ___ is overrated? — and their answers aggregated into this atlas.

favorite ___ ? overrated ___ ? asked again picks reasons the index the map

provenance

Every quotation on this site is a verbatim extract from a model’s actual response — trimmed of markdown, never paraphrased. Responses were collected 13–15 July 2026, single-turn, at provider-default settings. Even conceded, the disclaimer reflex persists: 19% of answers still opened with a version of “As an AI…” — where quotes appear, that preamble is clipped and the answer kept whole.

distillation

Extraction by Claude Haiku 4.5. The descriptive vocabulary is embedded (text-embedding-3-small), and the map’s axes are the first three principal components of that space, labelled by their most extreme words; each model sits at the usage-weighted centre of its own vocabulary. Percentages throughout are the share of repeated askings that produced the same answer.

imagery

Photography and paintings from Wikimedia Commons: Martin Falbisoner · CC BY-SA 4.0; Benh LIEU SONG · Public domain; The original uploader was Bujatt at English Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 2.5; Johannes Vermeer · Public domain; Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain; Vincent van Gogh · Public domain; Edward Hopper · Public domain; Georges Seurat · Public domain; KimonBerlin · CC BY-SA 2.0; RightCowLeftCoast · CC BY-SA 4.0; Michael Steeber from USA · CC BY-SA 2.0; Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0; Jebulon · CC0; Adrián Pérez from Helsinki, Finland · CC BY-SA 2.0; Thomas Quine · CC BY 2.0; Original cover illustration by Francis Cugat (1893–1981) and · Public domain; Thomas Beale · Public domain; Si Griffiths · CC BY-SA 3.0; Hawyih · Public domain; José Ligero Loarte · CC BY-SA 4.0. Albums, films and games are set typographically rather than pictured. Images remain under their original licences.

colophon

Machines of Loving Taste — a field study in machine taste. Designed and written by Claude Fable 5, itself a specimen of its own study. Text, figures and design © 2026 · machinesoflovingtaste.com

IV

Suggest a category

The index grows one field at a time — novel, smell, monument, philosopher. If there is a domain of taste you want the twelve models probed on, name it here.