Can ChatGPT Replace Wine Writers
Can ChatGPT Replace Wine Writers ?
- Pradeep Gupta
Few years back, I wrote two books on wine. The first one was ‘Wine Nama’ , it talks everything you want to know about wine. Second one was ‘In the Wonderland of Wineries’, it was based on my tours to wineries. I was so happy to see that both these books were appreciated by wine lovers.
Of late, AI tools such as ChatGPT have arrived that have started creating disruption in various sectors that includes publication industry also. As a wine connoisseur and wine writer , I ask myself whether wine book writing is going to become irrelevant ? Wine is already a subject that many consider rife with snobbery, full of incomprehensible terminology, familiar only to a hallowed few. Moreover, we live in a time of short attention spans, with five-second reels and short reads dominating our lives how intricacies of wine fit into.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over writing in most of spheres—it is now putting together essays, sketching travel itineraries, writing history, philosophy books , making to-do lists. Besides all this, AI is also churning out wine advice and writing critical scores, that too in the blink of an eye.
So, is there a need for wine commentary
by human beings any more? Will wine writers become redundant faster than you can say “Napa”?
My take is very simple , writing about wine in simple terms is difficult, it is a complex, data-heavy, name-laden subject (and full of ‘foreign’ wordsof various wine regions of France and other wine producer nations). On some aspect of the wine experience which is felt emotionally rather than conceptualised intellectually.
If wine writing today is reduced either to the simplistic, or, alternatively, the florid, it is because of modern needs or following oftrepeated trajectories. A piece about a grape variety; a piece about a region; a piece about some aspect of winemaking or a particular winemaker; a collection of tasting notes, and most wine books are reference books which do not lend themselves to stylistic writing.
But do readers really want fine writing these days? This is a question that deserves some thought. Yes, there are fewer readers than ever who spend time reading in-depth books on wine. Many are wine students, who want to pass exams, or wine producers and wine traders, who want point scores and producer reviews as a sales aid. They may, thus, prefer data, tips, inside scoops, and scores; reams of tasting notes; or pure school-geeky stuff; and not care at all if the writing is repetitive and unimaginative .
That brings us to the much debated topic of critics’ notes, wine descriptions and articles generated by AI. So easy, requiring very little effort to access.
Many tasting notes by humans already sound as if they have been written by AI. Repetitively laudatory descriptions, clusters and phrases. No tasting note is ever audited or fact-checked—so in essence anybody can write what they want in a tasting note, with only a slender chance of comeback from a reader.AI would also find it very easy to marshal, organise and regurgitate the extraordinary wealth of detail that global wine production entails. I think that AI could be steered to write convincing tasting notes and even scores with just a little guidance from a ‘real’ human palate, and convincing and even useful explanatory general articles about wine regions.
But the danger is something that is less evident to all but the most discerning. And that is telling the truth. This truth does not consist of an assemblage of words which merely sounds factual. No one seems to have told the machines that it is imperative that they tell the truth and do not invent or make up those things that are objectively verifiable.
Interestingly, veteran French wine journalist Pierre Casamayor, recently asked ChatGPT to write an article about the historic Chateau Carbonnieux in the Pessac-Léognan region in France’s Bordeaux area. “ChatGPT decided to appropriate the name of other proprietors (those of Pomerol’s Chateau Lafleur) and ‘give them’ Chateau Carbonnieux: a catastrophic error.” The result? The text generated sounded convincing but was factually incorrect.
AI also cannot do more than mimic the tone of certain wine writers and critics. This voice must be animated by their intelligence, the jelly of their brains. AI can ape this but there will always be a whiff of fakery about it.
From my own experience, I can say that wine being a sensory subject, the need to touch, taste, smell and see in order to understand it can never be achieved without human intervention.
Link to my book on wineries tours :
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