Over the last few months, we’ve seen a levelling up of AI in our puny human lives. From putting visual artists out of a job, to haunting our nightmares, artificial intelligence is finding all kinds of new applications serving—and potentially supplanting?—our purposes. But a brewery in British Columbia has found a way to harness the unnerving powers of AI for good, by charging chatbot ChatGPT to come up with a beer recipe
worthy of the Whistle Buoy Brewing name. And, unlike its hilariously clunky “can’t draw hands” brethren, ChatGPT came through, generating a “fluffy, tropical” brew that the Whistle Buoy crew is duly serving up to its emphatically human customers. From the CBC:
“Whistle Buoy Brewing partner Isaiah Archer says his team had been playing around with the program ChatGPT, hoping it would help with developing product descriptions and writing social media posts, when they were inspired to try something else.
‘As we were typing various things into it, we thought, let’s see what happens if we ask it to give us a beer recipe,” he told CBC’s Rohit Joseph. They asked for a fluffy, tropical hazy pale ale. It spat out a recipe that, for the most part, works. […]
The recipe wasn’t perfect — Archer said it initially gave measurements for a homebrew batch. When it was adjusted for a larger brewing operation, he said it didn’t quite make sense, so they had to make some changes.
‘We had to add some human intervention,’ Archer said.”
The AI accepted that intervention, and thankfully didn’t go Skynet on us, thus eliminating the beer industry entirely. But tacky sentience jokes aside, the brewery’s owners appreciate ChatGPT’s “solid” work and are interested in a further collaboration that complements human ingenuity rather than cancels it out. From DFC’s perspective, I’d be very interested to test an AI on its condiment-inventing skills…I may pop over to ChatGPT and ask for a mustard recipe—I’ll report back if anything especially delicious comes up!