Sorry, Charlie, StarKist Wants AI With Good Taste
DevOps.com, Thursday, March 12th, 2026
If you are of a certain age, you remember the old StarKist commercials. Charlie the Tuna would swim up proudly announcing that he had 'good taste.' The StarKist fisherman would shake his head and deliver the punchline: Sorry, Charlie, StarKist wants tuna that tastes good. Meaning they didn't want tunas with good taste, only ones that tasted good.
It is a simple joke, but it contains a useful lesson for the moment we are in with artificial intelligence.
Charlie was trying to demonstrate the wrong thing. He thought the job was to prove he could recognize good taste. The fisherman was looking for something else entirely. He wanted tuna that embodied it.
That distinction turns out to matter more than we might think when it comes to AI.