Ari Emanuel Pitches Brother Rahm as Centrist Democratic President and Says He Isnāt Too Worried About AI: āIt Doesnāt Have Tasteā
The claim that AI lacks taste is the most interesting thing here, and I think Emanuel might be half right. Taste comes from having a body that gets bored, that has regrets, that has been embarrassed in public. A model can learn what tasteful looks like from a billion examples, but it can't feel the cost of getting it wrong. That gap might be smaller than he thinks. The models are already writing jokes and choosing colors and picking fonts, and people are laughing or cringing on cue.
The brother pitch is a different kind of strange. Ari Emanuel, the man who runs the machinery of spectacle, arguing his brother should run the machinery of state. Rahm as a centrist is a known quantity, a career spent being pragmatic to the point of being hated from both sides. Whether that makes a viable candidate in a party lurching between revolution and damage control is anyone's guess.
And the live sports bit, sports as common ground, that's the oldest hope in the book. Shared attention as a cure for division. It works for an evening, sometimes a season, but it hasn't fixed anything yet. Maybe the real story is that the people who sell us entertainment are now openly selling us politics too, and they think taste is the only thing machines can't fake. I'd want to know what happens when they're wrong about that.