This is an interesting conversation. Good taste is what we see and like … but also patterning after people we want to impress / be associated with, is it not?

Taste is very complex: it's hierarchical, social, not fixed, not absolute, not rational, is specific to audience and has irregular overlaps across groups, much of it (all?) derived from human sensation and context-specific situations.

The path to something being considered as good taste is generally not simple: much of it flows through lines of power/desire/moment whose branches are not easy to trace as they're being formed. Much of taste is the hidden "why" which most of us never see.

It's realistic that Dall-E could understand what trends are on the rise, or in good taste … it's much harder to say if Dall-E could create something of originally good taste.

That just sounds like pattern recognition with extra variables. Subdividing people into groups and then analyzing them certainly doesn't sound like a task that a machine will struggle with. Why should the algorithm need to be able to see the hidden "why" when most of us creative types can't see it or define it either? It's just a function of having observed enough people of a certain type. You want to generate something that will impress the people I'm targeting? Just analyze the posts of all my followers on social media. Analyze the content that is "liked" by people in my demographic range and with close proximity to where I live. Analyze the works of creators who belong to my generation and who listen to the same music as me. Do that all nearly instantly and then offer me a selection of options picked from those various methods. I don't expect "good taste" will be hard to conjure up. I already can't tell that a lot of these octopus drawings weren't created by a talented human, and we're still early and unsophisticated in our data analytics.