I have so many questions, none of which are answered by the article. Was the flavor really picked by an AI? If so, how did they train the AI? What kind of AI was this? What other flavors did it come up with? Did they try a bunch of them and this was the best one they could get?
This whole thing just screams marketing stunt to me, and not a particularly good one. I can’t wait for this whole AI thing to just die out already. How is it that every tech fad seems to somehow end up being even dumber than the previous one (although I think the whole NFT thing might have set a new low bar)?
They probably trained it using data from their Coca-Cola freestyle dispensers if you’ve used one. That’s my guess.
People like Vanilla and people like Grape, so here’s Vanilla-Grape by CokeAI!
Sounds horrifyingly plausible.
I’d drink that tbh
Yeah sounds like a Purple Cow, I’d be all over that
“Unsurprisingly, ‘Diarrhea Sasquatch Xtreme’ hit the mark yet failed to wow test groups,” is likely one of many test flavors removed from the article for PR reasons.
The answer is simple. They’re using blockchain NFTs to reach new market growth using AI to provide flavor solutions to consumers
I don’t know what their ai process looks like, what kind of data they trained it on, etc.
But annecdotally, I’ve played around a bit with chatgpt making cocktail recipes, and it’s been surprisingly good at it. They sometimes need a little fine-tuning but they tend to get you in a pretty close ballpark, it’s made some interesting suggestions I probably wouldn’t have thought of, but nothing that turned out to be bad.
A lot of recipes tend to follow some pretty well-established ratios which means they can be broken down into some sort of mathematical formula which is something computers can actually do pretty well, and it’s often just a matter for swapping out one ingredient or combination of them for another that is similarly salty/sweet/bitter/sour/umami.
For example a standard recipe for punch is 1 part sour, 2 of sweet, 3 of strong (liquor of your choice), 4 of weak (tea, juice, soda, water, etc.) and you can mix and match just about any ingredients that fit those profiles and get a drinkable punch.
I’m sure a company like coke probably has a long list of flavorings with known and well-documented flavor profiles that an ai trained on a list of proven recipes could mix and match with all day long.
Companies using AI in a stupid way will die out, but the models themselves are far too useful for certain job fields (probably not yours or you wouldn’t be comparing it to NFT’s) for them to ever die. They’re going to expand and become integrated into the data environment.
The press release they link to is not especially forthcoming with information either and all they can get in terms of details is from that press release and tasting it themselves.
Well, on the label of the ones I tried it said co-developed by AI.
So yeah, probably marketing stunt
That said, if it hadn’t been artificially sweetened, I would probably have preferred it to the normal one. Felt like it had more flavor. Similar to Fritz Cola from Germany.
Wow no shit, it’s going to be very annoying to see every single company try to slap AI onto their product in order to market it until the hype dies down
This reminds me of the dot com bobble.
Now you get %10000 evaluation if you slap AI in the investors powerpoint slide.
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The problem probably was that Coke isn’t in the soda creating business. People already drink a ridiculous amount of sodas. Coke is in the soda cheapening business, the only thing left for them to do is cut corners until making soda costs nothing. New sodas are just an opportunity for them to redefine cheap to a new low. This is why you should buy independent, small scale soda companies. Their entire business model is making something better than Coke.
Coke is in the branding business, IMHO.
They do a lot more advert creation than they do drink creation.
Pretty much all modern branded consumer goods invest way more on brand recognition and the kind of advertising that says nothing about quality and is purelly designed to create a subconsciously association they brand and positive feelings and/or make it seem socially fashionable (you know the kind: happy friends around a campfire having fun with package-of-branded-good on their hands)
(Those things are actually funny to analyse: generally drinks do “social/trendy”, perfumes do “sex”, cars do “freedom”)
At some point in the 60s in the US a nephew of Freud (I kid you not!) introduced actual teachings from the Science of Psychology into Advertising and since then consumers of large brands have been mostly manipulated via that kind of psychologically manipulative advert. Nowadays you pretty much only see other kinds of adverts for cases like small brands trying to expand brand recognition (something the likes of Coka-Cola doesn’t need), and for the rest seldom are the actual qualities of the product being sold mentioned.
I don’t think cheap is what they’re after. Unless you mean this somehow helps their margins? Around here a 20oz soda is approaching $3 USD when just a year ago it was nearly half that. That’s definitely not cheap.
Cheap for them to make, not for us to buy.
See Futurama already explored this problem with Bender. As a robot, he can’t taste food, but he learned the secret to Ultimate Flavor. It’s hallucinogenics. Coca-Cola co. forgot to drop acid into their AI-generated soda. And I’m not talking about the kind that strips rust off of bumpers. Coke has enough of that in it already.
I enjoyed the episode, but hoo boy lsd would not act as a flavour enhancer, take hours to kick in, and probably make a good chunk of people feel nauseous.
The Prompt: “AI, create a soda flavor!”
The response: “Heres a recipe for a soda flavor… 1C corn syrup, 2C carbonated water, 1tsp your choice of food coloring. I could have prefaced this recipe with 10 paragraphs explaining the history of soda littered with browser breaking ads, but I am not a sociopath.”
Should stick with Marge’s homemade Pepsi.
Of course an AI would use shitty imperial measurements instead of metric
Chatgpt can be a cool way to generate ideas for flavours. It’s ultimately a tool. That means there needs to be someone to actually test, tweak and verify those ideas, which at that point it’s no longer AI generated.
Surprising no one.
I was really hoping this was an article with early sales numbers showing it’s a flop. I already assumed it was going to taste bad, that feels like a given to me. I want it to be a failure in sales so this kind of thing stops happening.
It will do well in sales initially due to FOMO, but I am guessing it won’t last due to it not tasting especially interesting.
That is my assumption as well. That’s kind of the trend with most new flavors of soda it seems. Very few actually stick. This one is just so much more obnoxious in origin than most that I want it to die quicker lol.
Coke Y3000 sounds like it was supposed to be the kind of thing that would be used in a metaverse tie-in promo.
What Coke offshoots have actually landed? Like Zero, Diet, Cherry, Vanilla and maybe Lemon?
You can taste the silicon!
MSG and truffle oil with a splash of hazelnut spread
Dafuq? Where is the avocado?!
Cut him a break. He’s trying to save for a house.
The flavor tasted like a sprite but with a fruity aftertaste to me. Honestly didn’t know any ai involvement with the drink when I initially got it I just like trying the coke creations flavors. Starlight was still my favorite.
I don’t think it was a bad flavor, it tasted like if you went to one of these Coke Freestyle machine and mixed a little bit of every flavor of Coca Cola together: A generically sweet, artificial fruity flavor.
The packaging are pretty cool though.
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Ok, but I read that sentence near the beginning as “The massive beverage company has trapped an artificial intelligence to serve as its advisor” and I think it’d be neat if corporations had to patiently lie in wait for an unsuspecting AI to come along and bait it with some tasty data before they can use it.
