My dudes, did you just use an AI-generated image as the marquee for an anti-AI post?!?? I gotta give you some sh*t for that. And push you use those a little less in the future, too. AI art is one of *the* most ethically iffy offerings of current AI, so at least minimize the use of it!
Now, great post to get us started here, though I'm somewhat shocked to realize...I think I might disagree with literally every single point you argued! And I'm not remotely pro-AI!
I have to save most of it for my own upcoming post, but I'll comment on one statement here:
"LLMs can’t tell you what a particular wine actually tastes like. They can often tell you what specific critics who have tasted the wine have said about it, or what the producers have said about it, or they can give an averaged out generalization of notes that have been publicly released."
My response to that: *how are most human somms any different than this?*
Humans can tell you what they think they taste, which may or may not be affected by what they recently ate, drank, breathed, how well they slept, etc., and even putting that aside thet can't say what any other person is going to taste.
And even beyond this, human group think is real: most somms are going to describe a wine based on a pre-taught set of flavor notes they're programmeed to think of and use, especially in regards to any specific type of wine. Whether it's an AI cobbling together a description based on past writings or a human essentially doing the same, neither can be trusted to have determined a wine's taste based on anything less than programming given to the by other humans. Other humans have a similar success ratio when trying to describe a wine to me as any official write up of a wine does in matching my own take on the wine. And even that "official write-up", at the end of the day, was written by a human describing how the wine tasted to them. I'm not sure I'm seeing where AI and human somms differ enough on this front.
A lot to unpack here! Okay, first of all, this isn't an "anti-AI" post, it's part of an examination of AI and its role in the world of wine, and respectfully disagree that ironically using an AI image as the cover is problematic. As far as your perspective on the quoted part of the post I think this is a bad faith interpretation of what we wrote. The idea that humans don't have honest personal opinions and subjective sensory experiences is insane. I won't argue that there isn't bias -- I think the best or most original tasting notes often come from people who know little to nothing about wine or the classic tasting notes given to them. But that doesn't change the fact that these are people who can actually experience the wines themselves, and sure there are probably people who just regurgitate other people's notes, but you've got to seek out the voices that you trust. You can find people who you agree with or disagree with the tastes of, and they can be a reliable resource, like finding movie or book critics you respect or understand. They'll give you consistent perspectives and whether you disagree or agree with them, you get a directional sense of where you'll land because you trust the perspective to be honest. You can't say the same of an AI unless it's quoting specific people.
And as for this "Whether it's an AI cobbling together a description based on past writings or a human essentially doing the same" like I am genuinely baffled that you think humans just amass averaged opinions from other sources and don't have their own. Just using our blog for example, we are only writing tasting notes on bottles we've tasted, we aren't scraping the internet for other people's opinions who, by your logic, did the same. Where's the source material in that loop? At any rate, appreciate you taking the time to comment, looking forward to seeing your deeper analysis in the days to come!
AI art will always be problematic, whether ironic in its use or not. You may be able to argue that it isn't ironic (though I still don't buy that, either - this is a lot of pushback on two line items for a "not an anti-AI post") but that still doesn't argue against the issue of AI art on the whole.
"The idea that humans don't have honest personal opinions and subjective sensory experiences is insane."
That's not what I wrote, speaking of bad faith interpretations - or perhaps simply faulty interpretations, let's not conflate those two thing, I think we are both doing this in good faith. I literally wrote "Humans can tell you what they taste..." Humans of course have a subjective experience, but transforming that into language is rarely subjective or particularly personal. If it was, wine tasting notes wouldn't be as homogenous as they are. Have you ever tasted "garrigue"? How about a raw gooseberry? Or fresh churned earth? Certainly some human writers have written more personal tasting notes than others, but not the majority. And then consider even if they did: how would this be helpful? Sometimes I see tasting notes about very specific species of cherry or orange or mushroom that I've never even heard of. Is that helpful? And would I peronally taste the same thing even if I was familiar?
We're not talking about if a person can slowly cobble together their own palate translations to another's - we're talking about whether an AI in a somm position is more or less useful than a human in that same role. When it comes to giving tasting notes in a moment of service, I have to say I'm not seeing the difference between the two, in this specific context.
"I am genuinely baffled that you think humans just amass averaged opinions from other sources and don't have their own."
Humans are social creatures and very, *very* vulnerable to group think, mob mentality, and social modes of thinking at any given time in history. Sociology is pretty clear on this topic. There will always be outliers, unlike with AI, but outliers alone don't create a major enough distinction when considering somms-in-service as a whole. And when you couple this with the fact that the majority of humanity lacks any significant understanding of wine to begin with (something that is key), thn whether a somm states something like the a god-given truth or an AI does, the guest isn't likely to distinguish the difference between the two. And, again, we're talking about whether AI can replace somms. And I think somms as they currently exist - there's a LOT that AI can replace, given where we currently are.
Anywho, I was trying to keep it simple for the comment section, but there is much to unpack here, as you said.
My dudes, did you just use an AI-generated image as the marquee for an anti-AI post?!?? I gotta give you some sh*t for that. And push you use those a little less in the future, too. AI art is one of *the* most ethically iffy offerings of current AI, so at least minimize the use of it!
Now, great post to get us started here, though I'm somewhat shocked to realize...I think I might disagree with literally every single point you argued! And I'm not remotely pro-AI!
I have to save most of it for my own upcoming post, but I'll comment on one statement here:
"LLMs can’t tell you what a particular wine actually tastes like. They can often tell you what specific critics who have tasted the wine have said about it, or what the producers have said about it, or they can give an averaged out generalization of notes that have been publicly released."
My response to that: *how are most human somms any different than this?*
Humans can tell you what they think they taste, which may or may not be affected by what they recently ate, drank, breathed, how well they slept, etc., and even putting that aside thet can't say what any other person is going to taste.
And even beyond this, human group think is real: most somms are going to describe a wine based on a pre-taught set of flavor notes they're programmeed to think of and use, especially in regards to any specific type of wine. Whether it's an AI cobbling together a description based on past writings or a human essentially doing the same, neither can be trusted to have determined a wine's taste based on anything less than programming given to the by other humans. Other humans have a similar success ratio when trying to describe a wine to me as any official write up of a wine does in matching my own take on the wine. And even that "official write-up", at the end of the day, was written by a human describing how the wine tasted to them. I'm not sure I'm seeing where AI and human somms differ enough on this front.
A lot to unpack here! Okay, first of all, this isn't an "anti-AI" post, it's part of an examination of AI and its role in the world of wine, and respectfully disagree that ironically using an AI image as the cover is problematic. As far as your perspective on the quoted part of the post I think this is a bad faith interpretation of what we wrote. The idea that humans don't have honest personal opinions and subjective sensory experiences is insane. I won't argue that there isn't bias -- I think the best or most original tasting notes often come from people who know little to nothing about wine or the classic tasting notes given to them. But that doesn't change the fact that these are people who can actually experience the wines themselves, and sure there are probably people who just regurgitate other people's notes, but you've got to seek out the voices that you trust. You can find people who you agree with or disagree with the tastes of, and they can be a reliable resource, like finding movie or book critics you respect or understand. They'll give you consistent perspectives and whether you disagree or agree with them, you get a directional sense of where you'll land because you trust the perspective to be honest. You can't say the same of an AI unless it's quoting specific people.
And as for this "Whether it's an AI cobbling together a description based on past writings or a human essentially doing the same" like I am genuinely baffled that you think humans just amass averaged opinions from other sources and don't have their own. Just using our blog for example, we are only writing tasting notes on bottles we've tasted, we aren't scraping the internet for other people's opinions who, by your logic, did the same. Where's the source material in that loop? At any rate, appreciate you taking the time to comment, looking forward to seeing your deeper analysis in the days to come!
AI art will always be problematic, whether ironic in its use or not. You may be able to argue that it isn't ironic (though I still don't buy that, either - this is a lot of pushback on two line items for a "not an anti-AI post") but that still doesn't argue against the issue of AI art on the whole.
"The idea that humans don't have honest personal opinions and subjective sensory experiences is insane."
That's not what I wrote, speaking of bad faith interpretations - or perhaps simply faulty interpretations, let's not conflate those two thing, I think we are both doing this in good faith. I literally wrote "Humans can tell you what they taste..." Humans of course have a subjective experience, but transforming that into language is rarely subjective or particularly personal. If it was, wine tasting notes wouldn't be as homogenous as they are. Have you ever tasted "garrigue"? How about a raw gooseberry? Or fresh churned earth? Certainly some human writers have written more personal tasting notes than others, but not the majority. And then consider even if they did: how would this be helpful? Sometimes I see tasting notes about very specific species of cherry or orange or mushroom that I've never even heard of. Is that helpful? And would I peronally taste the same thing even if I was familiar?
We're not talking about if a person can slowly cobble together their own palate translations to another's - we're talking about whether an AI in a somm position is more or less useful than a human in that same role. When it comes to giving tasting notes in a moment of service, I have to say I'm not seeing the difference between the two, in this specific context.
"I am genuinely baffled that you think humans just amass averaged opinions from other sources and don't have their own."
Humans are social creatures and very, *very* vulnerable to group think, mob mentality, and social modes of thinking at any given time in history. Sociology is pretty clear on this topic. There will always be outliers, unlike with AI, but outliers alone don't create a major enough distinction when considering somms-in-service as a whole. And when you couple this with the fact that the majority of humanity lacks any significant understanding of wine to begin with (something that is key), thn whether a somm states something like the a god-given truth or an AI does, the guest isn't likely to distinguish the difference between the two. And, again, we're talking about whether AI can replace somms. And I think somms as they currently exist - there's a LOT that AI can replace, given where we currently are.
Anywho, I was trying to keep it simple for the comment section, but there is much to unpack here, as you said.