Tag Archives: AI wine writing

Is it time to panic over chatbot wine reviews?

Frustrated computer user
“No. no, no.. petite sirah is not the same as sirah. Or even syrah.””

Hardly. How can it rant about wine the way the WC can?

Artificial intelligence and wine writing are nothing new on the blog. I’ve posted about it nine times since 2015 — before most of the media, wine or otherwise, even knew what it was.

So excuse me if I haven’t panicked about the latest chatbot developments.

Because lots of others have, whether the AI is penning poetry, developing software code, or creating term papers. A piece in the New York Times said AI writing could be used “to generate and spread untruths” (as if humanity hasn’t been doing that for as long as there has been humanity). Even the Linux community, which is usually too cool to be bothered with stuff like this, was more than a little concerned when a coding site called GitHub unveiled an AI called Copilot to “help” write code.

Yes, chatbots can help students cheat – as if they need any help. Yes, AI can be used to write news stories – if the news organization is willing to spend a lot of time editing out mistakes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if someone started using them to write the junk that’s on the back labels of wine bottles.

What AI writing can’t do is think. It can gather information and organize it, and sometimes even do a terrific job. But it can’t taste wine and write a review, and it certainly can’t decide whether a $12 wine is varietally correct or offers value. This blog post, where a tech guy described how he designed an AI to write tasting notes, was notable for two things: First, how “tasting note” they sounded, even though the information came from gathering and organizing. But that may say as much about tasting notes as they do the AI’s skills. Second, that the site mentioned in the post stopped working shortly after I wrote about it, unable to keep up with what it needed to do.

But, perhaps the most important caveat: An AI can’t decide what to write about, the way I can. Yes, it can be given an assignment, but who is going to decide what’s important enough for it to “write” about — and then decide if it can complete the assignment correctly? And it certainly can’t look at the wine business and decide what’s going on the blog for the next week.

Until that happens, we still need cranky ex-newspaper reporters.

More about AI wine writing:
• Are machine-written wine reviews closer than ever?
• Artificial intelligence and wine recommendations
• Winecast 30: Arty, the first artificial intelligence wine writer

 

Winebits 758: Hot weather, alcohol-free wine, AI wine writing

Drinky the Robot
Drinky loves wine, though he does have trouble tasting it

This week’s wine news: Hot weather is cooking wine shipments, plus questions about alcohol-free wine and AI wine writing

• Hot, hot, hot: The temperature in Dallas has been above 100 for nine days in a row, including 106 on Friday and 105 on Saturday. I mention this not to elicit sympathy (it still beats shoveling snow), but to remind everyone to be careful when shipping wine at temperatures like this. A sample arrived last week broken and leaking; as near as I could tell, the bottle just sort of exploded because of the heat. This is not common, but not uncommon, either, as I wrote in a freelance piece for Pix.wine. Excessive heat can pop the cork and cause leakage, and it can even cook the wine, making it taste like bad fortified wine.

• Calling out alcohol-fre: Huon Hooke, writing in Australia’s Brisbane Times, wants to know” “Is alcohol-free wine even wine?” Writes Hooke: “Is a sausage without meat still a sausage? Is a tarte tatin without apples still a tarte tatin?” The piece is well worth reading, delving into the metaphysical questions involved here. How can wine, which is made with alcohol, still be wine without it? In this, he writes, “There’s a place for these drinks. It’s just not my place.” I can’t say I disagree; if I don’t want alcohol, I’ll drink iced tea.

• Figuring out AI? David Beck, writing in Food & Beverage Analytics, asks: Why are wine critics afraid of artificial intelligence and wine writing? I was going to write a terrific, standalone rant on the blog answering this question, especially since the article criticized some of my — dare I say — top-notch writing about wine and artificial intelligence. But Beck’s piece didn’t make much sense. It was poorly written, jumbled, and disjointed, and even his criticism of me missed the point. AI wine writing isn’t here to make human life easier, but to make more money for surveillance capitalism. So let’s mention it here, and then we can forget about it. Right, Drinky?

Are machine-written wine reviews closer than ever?

AI wine reviews
“Come on, already. What’s taking so long? It’s only a bunch of crummy chardonnay reviews.”

Dartmouth researcher: “We couldn’t tell them apart from human reviews”

A group of Dartmouth researchers have apparently taken the next step in machine-written wine reviews. Their study, published earlier this year in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, takes the work we’ve seen with artificial intelligence and brings it to a terrifying new place: The results “show strong support for the assertion that machines can write reviews that are indistinguishable from those written by experts.”

Keith Carlson, a doctoral research fellow at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, didn’t say that the algorithm he and four others developed would show up as part of Wine Spectator tasting notes anytime soon. Some work still needs to be done, including further research into how similar the machine reviews are to human reviews.

Which is what I noticed: The examples were close, but not quite there – one machine rose review mentioned vanilla, which isn’t all that common in rose.

Still, Carlson told me, advancements in machine neural networks allowed the group to apparently come closer than anyone has before in making AI-generated wine reviews practical. Their algorithm used thousands of tasting notes from wine magazines to come up with a way that a machine could “teach” itself to write reviews.

Take that as you will. Regular readers will know how I feel. Wine has enough problems without some marketing guru — or, even worse, some media type – using AI reviews to flog product on the cheap. If this is practical, I can see AI reviews trolling sites like Vivino and Cellar Tracker, making consumers think the wines are more popular than they are – or taste a certain way when they may not.

That the study was published in a marketing journal is especially bothersome, as if the only use for technology is to sell stuff. And the Dartmouth news release even used the word “disrupt,” which is tech speak for “this will make us a gazillion dollars and aren’t we smarter than everyone else.”

Carlson emphasized that the last thing the group wants is for AI reviews to replace people. Rather, he says, they can be used to make wine reviewing easier, as a starting point for human reviewers. Perhaps. But I don’t know that the machine’s cabernet sauvignon review – dry, with blackberry fruit – is going to tell me anything new about cabernet.

But what do I know? I’m not out to disrupt anything.

More about AI wine reviews:
• “Crisp and fresh:” AI wine writing strikes again
• Artificial intelligence and wine recommendations
• AI wine writing: Maybe it’s not around the corner after all

“Crisp and fresh:” AI wine writing strikes again

ai wine writingWill AI wine writing eventually make wine tasting irrelevant?

This is a mineral-driven wine that’s crisp and fresh, with a flinty edge. It is very tangy, with zesty citrus, giving a bright character. It needs time to mature, so wait until late vintage.

That’s a review of one of my favorite $10 wines – the Chateau Bonnet Blanc, a white French Bordeaux. But I didn’t write it, and neither, technically, did any other human wine critic.

Instead, it was written by an artificial intelligence – the Wine Review Generator created by long-time wine industry executive Michael Brill. Brill, who also does tech, software, and AI consulting, wanted to find out if he could “teach” a machine to write tasting notes.

And, for the most part, that’s what he did.

Brill left a comment about last week’s blog post about the future of AI wine writing. That led to our phone conversation this week, where Brill said improved technology has made it possible to create the Chateau Bonnet review with a minimal amount of human programming. All you need, he said, is a database of wine terms, wine regions, grape varieties, and so forth. That information, combined with advances in neural network research that have helped scientists better understand how to program machines to “think,” led to the review software and to the Bonnet review.

In this, Brill said, a machine’s ability to “write” longer and more coherent sentences has improved tremendously. Before, he explained, an AI story might be half readable and half nonsense, and the most it could create was a 10-word sentence. Today, those numbers are 90 and 10 percent, and it can write a readable 10-sentence paragraph.

How the machine does this, needless to say, is incredibly complicated. It makes predictions about what comes next in a sentence based on the words that came before, a process that is much more like writing than previous AI efforts; those were more like filling in a template. Here, the AI has “learned” that a mineral-driven wine is crisp and fresh, and not oaky and flabby, so it picks the former phrase to follow mineral-driven instead of the latter.

Which is why the Chateau Bonnet Blanc effort is not a bad tasting note. It’s mostly accurate (save for the bit about aging) and it conforms to the rules of grammar and the sensibilities of wine. That the machine wrote the review without tasting the wine is impressive, and knowing only the cost and some characteristics, is impressive. And more than a little spooky.

And not just because an AI is cheaper to hire than I am. Brill said advances in machine writing could eventually make product reviews useless. Some of that happens today on Amazon, where it’s not uncommon to see badly written AI reviews praising a product. But the situation could get even worse as AI writing improves.

A top-notch AI could flood Amazon with machine-generated positive (or even negative) reviews, with the resulting effect on sales. Or it might be possible for one restaurant to force another out of business with an AI-written campaign on Yelp.

And who would know the difference?

AI wine writing: Maybe it’s not around the corner after all

AI wine writing
This AI’s wine notes may not be as good as those written by a human — so how bad would they be?

AI wine writing technology needs to advance past copying a formula, even for something as simple as a tasting note

Will software replace wine writing? We’ve worried about this on the blog, where every advance in artificial intelligence made AI wine writing seem that much more likely. It became especially terrifying after noted journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in the New York Times that some writing “could itself be automated and possibly improved by computers.”

Scores are bad enough, but artificial intelligence scores?

Not to worry, though. Two recent reports found that no matter how far artificial intelligence writing has come, it hasn’t come quite far enough, even for AI wine writing.

The New Yorker’s John Seabrook offered the most complete story about AI writing I’ve seen. “Each time I clicked the refresh button,” he wrote, “the prose that the machine generated became more random; after three or four tries, the writing had drifted far from the original prompt. … [I]n a way that reminded me of Hal, the superintelligent computer in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ when the astronauts begin to disconnect its mainframe-size artificial brain.”

That’s more or less the conclusion, too, of the Johnson column in The Economist working off of Seabrook’s essay: “Don’t fear the Writernator,” Johnson said, and so it looks like human wine writing has been saved – for the time being, anyway.

Why was I so worried? Because there have been so many advances in AI writing that it seemed inevitable that something as formulaic as what we do would be turned over to an AI. How difficult would it be to write an algorithm that would parse wine grapes, wine regions, and descriptors to give us what we see all the time in every Wine Magazine? How much cheaper would it be to dispose of wine writers? After all, it’s not like writing a tasting note-style wine review is like writing for the New Yorker.

And, in fact, tremendous progress has been made with tasting note-style writing. As I reported last summer, it’s possible to use basic Python programming skills to come up with formulaic writing like tasting notes thanks to advances in neural network research and how to mimic what the human brain does. I wasn’t able to write reviews for the blog, as I had hoped; my Python skills are too rudimentary. But those more advanced are apparently doing it.

But both Seabrook and the Johnson writer argue that even that simple kind of writing is still a ways off. It’s one thing to teach a machine how to route rush hour traffic, but it’s something completely different to teach it how to write. Mimicking a formula is not writing.

“What eludes computers is creativity,” said Johnson. “By virtue of having been trained on past compositions, they can only be derivative. Furthermore, they cannot conceive a topic or goal on their own, much less plan how to get there with logic and style.”

Which makes me feel a lot better.

More about AI wine writing:
• Winecast 30: Arty, the first artificial intelligence wine writer
• Let the computer write the wine reviews
• Do we really need wine writers?