How one app developer is integrating AI and human taste

It’s easy to think about AI as a sort of existential battle between human and machine. Maybe it will be, someday, in a Skynet sort of way. But there are also lots of people trying to figure out how to use AI not as a replacement for human creativity and thinking but as a tool meant to augment those things.

Sari Azout is one of those people. She’s the founder of Sublime, a platform dedicated to curation, creativity, and ideas. Sublime is all about taste, which makes it slightly surprising that there’s a huge amount of AI powering the way it works. But to Azout, it all makes sense.

On this episode of The Vergecast, the second in our two-part series on how developers are using and building AI into their products, Azout explains how she’s bringing AI to Sublime without changing what makes it human. She talks through the platform’s discovery options, the importance of good data, how humans and AI make connections together, and much more. She also walks us through Sublime’s latest tool, Podcast Magic, which is pretty much AI models all the way down.

Azout also explains how she’s using AI in her own life, both as a productivity tool and as a creative partner. She has some reservations about the way AI might develop, and what it might mean as we rely on it for ever more of our lives, but she’s confident there’s a balance that can work.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started: