Criticism, Intellectual Contempt, and Taste

What does a literary dispute between Joyce Carol Oates and Emily Wilson have to do with AI ethics and governance? More than it first appears. The disagreement exposes a category problem: our growing inability to distinguish criticism from intellectual contempt, and either of those from taste. AI did not create that problem. But AI-mediated systems can formalize it.

In public discourse, preference is often presented as judgment, confidence as evidence, and contempt as expertise. In institutional systems, the consequences are more serious: a model output can become a fact, an inference can become a record, and a ranking can become a decision without anyone stopping to ask what kind of claim is actually being made. That is a governance problem.