Drinks writers around the world have welcomed the arrival of AI ChatGPT, the machine-learning technology that can generate entire articles at the touch of a button.
‘It’s brilliant,’ said drinks writer Hugh Jego. ‘I wrote two columns, a feature on the Chinese drinks market and a review of a dozen own-label whiskies while I was having my breakfast.’
‘It’s made an incredibly tough job massively easier and cost me nothing except my credibility.’
Any style you like
‘The best thing is that you can amend the style to suit the demographic,’ agreed wine writer James Fabulous.
‘I asked it to write a tasting note for Dom Perignon to suit World of Fine Wine and it said “Perfectly paired with seafood or friends, Dom Perignon offers a lifted bouquet of baking spices, crushed dreams and a mouthfilling mouse of chalk and wet stones.”
‘But when I asked it to do the same for the Sun it came up with ‘Phwoarr. Look at the fizz on that. Sex in a bottle or what?’
Atypically productive
PRs too are excited by the possibilities of ChatGPT.
‘From now on wine writers on trips will be a lot more productive and a lot less irritating,’ predicted Emma Poche-Burd of the Sloane Alone agency.
‘They’ll be able to file copy instantaneously during lunch or dinner without having to visit the vineyard or winery.
‘Or, indeed, taste the products.’
GPT not A-OK?
However, technology expert, Professor Al Gorithm, said that the technology might not necessarily be the panacea that everyone thought.
‘ChatGPT stands for Generally Prosaic Text,’ he told Fake Booze. ‘It uses a huge amount of resources and energy to come up with even fairly basic information that’s not always relevant.
‘In that, it’s a lot like Wine Twitter.’
Clear wins
He admitted, however, that while ChatGPT had clear limitations, there were also enormous possibilities.
‘It’s incredibly effective at writing simple, unengaging content where style isn’t that important,’ he said.
‘Such as press releases, web content and anything in Wine Spectator.’
House whines
There have been suggestions that Chat GPT could be used to create wine lists.
‘Obviously there’s a challenge with them being written by something robotic and unfeeling with no imagination or human empathy,’ said Professor Gorithm.
‘So we’d definitely expect the programme to do better than most sommeliers.’
Publishing win
Critics have complained that ChatGPT just ‘regurgitates information and opinions that have all been heard before.’
However, George Foil-Cutter, editor of Decanter, said that this ‘pretty much put it on a par with all other drinks writing, only with the added advantage of delivering copy that was on time, coherent and not full of mistakes.’
‘We’re already planning our first ChatGPT edition over the summer, so we can all go on holiday for three months,’ he told Fake Booze.
‘And to stop our more traditional readers complaining we’re going to get every article written in the style of Michael Broadbent.
‘Even our Top Ten Slamming Tequilas for summer.’
Meta is better
Fake Booze challenged ChatGPT to come up with an article about itself in the style of a satirical drinks magazine.
However, reviewers dismissed its efforts as ‘pitiful’, ‘not very funny’ and ‘exactly the same as Fake Booze’.
So we published it anyway.
Click here to read about Apple’s new Smart Wine technology
