Meg Maker questions what makes wine writers unique in a world of automation and AI in her column and Letter from the Chair.
I put off writing this Letter from the Chair. What do I know about AI? I’m not a mathematician or computer scientist. I’m not a technology researcher or academic. I did take a course in graduate school about the philosophy of mind in which I learned about the Turing Test and Chinese Room Problem. These say, essentially, that if the machine can convince you it’s thinking, then it’s thinking.
It feels like we’ve gotten there, doesn’t it? I pose a question to Gemini about my research, and it answers in complete and readable sentences with all the information I need. Or at least I think it’s the information I need. I push on it, push back, and keep going, using research indices to find primary research and surf my way through the morass of material. I also use good old fashioned (twenty-year-old-fashioned) search.
I was a search engine early adopter. After hand coding my first website, in 1992, I landed a job as an information architect and front-end designer at a tiny five-person startup putting stock footage library catalogs online. The work involved ingesting millions of text-based, shot-level records aggregated from sources like ABC News, NBC, National Geographic, CNN, The Image Bank, and more, feeding them into a vast textual database. We made the data searchable, for free, by film and television producers on the new magic lantern called the Internet. Soon we were also processing and indexing the footage itself and sending those results through the thread-thin straws of the early web.
The key to our success—and we were successful; the company was swiftly acquired by a larger entity—was our support for natural language query. “Shark swimming in Cuban waters,” or “riot at Sing Sing Prison,” or “Nixon speeches.” Today such queries seem simplistic compared to the chatty badinage of Claude and ChatGPT. Back then it required us to parse synonyms, apply fuzzy logic, focus on weightings, and ignore stop words like the, and, at, and a. And we didn’t make users learn Boolean logic — this AND that NOT other — they could just type the query that made sense to them, and if we’d done our job, the search engine would figure it out and spit back something useful. As always, data out was only as good as data in, but we could rely on the integrity of the source material from the footage archives, which had been cataloged and indexed by trained library scientists.
Fast forward to today. The quality of the search chat is more sophisticated. The language seems even more natural and easily lulls us into a belief the machine is thinking. But the source material is a mess, essentially everything that’s published to the Internet and even stuff that’s not — stolen, in other words, from other sources. It’s not indexed or curated or assigned weights by library scientists. It’s too big. The scientists working on AI aren’t working on the corpus itself, they’re training the machine to do that work, to parse the meaning inherent in the system.
It’s impressive, I admit. I’ve come to rely on AI for my research, grateful for the range of information available and the clearly articulated results, which feel both authentic and reliable. AI search saves me a lot of time, like being served a fully cooked meal at a table rather than having to turn over rocks and forage in the bushes for nourishment.
But I’m a wine writer, a sensory professional. My expertise isn’t just writing, it’s writing about something, namely lived experience. To do that I have to be in touch with my messy human wetware, physical sensations, memories, then apply judgment and analysis and creativity to posit an original idea. And then put that into affective language another human might want to read.
If it goes onto the internet, yes, the machine will scrape it into its wide maw and store it as fat in its ever-expanding corpus. But at least for now, if the writing is about taste — meaning both flavor and discernment — humans are the only ones who can do that thinking.
Photo by Meg Maker