Let’s establish one thing up front: Sentient robots aren’t coming for your job. At least not yet.
According to a recent MIT study, replacing workers with artificial intelligence (A.I.) isn’t as economically viable as months of breathless headlines might have us believe. Nor are A.I. technologies likely to write credible drinks reviews anytime soon. Instead, researchers expect that A.I. will be gradually integrated into many people’s workdays.
It’s already happening: Drinks professionals currently use generative A.I. platforms like ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly to do all sorts of workplace tasks, from strategically segmenting email lists for newsletters, to ensuring web copy is A.D.A. compliant, to answering emails and more. While some express concerns about data security and creativity, others argue that overlooking A.I. tools would be akin to ignoring social media 15 years ago: It’s hard to stay competitive if you don’t get in the game.
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It’s not the first time the wine world has been divided over technological developments, of course, nor is it likely to be the last. Why, though, does A.I. seem to make so many of us uniquely uneasy?
“A lot of people just don’t understand what A.I. actually means,” says Ed Feuchuk, general manager of Tank Garage Winery in Calistoga, California. “They start thinking of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet from Terminator,” and imagine that any platform that uses A.I. is a nightmarish supermachine designed to render humans obsolete.
In reality, A.I. is an umbrella term for any machine or program that can complete tasks commonly associated with human intelligence, such as reasoning or problem solving. When you’re drafting an email and text appears to suggest how to complete your sentence, for example, that’s an A.I. language tool at work.
These sorts of technologies have no original ideas, Feuchuk explains. “They’re drawing on the corpus of existing ideas on the internet and remixing them based on what prompts you give them.” In other words, an A.I. language tool like ChatGPT is only as insightful as the information already available to it. It requires human guidance to ask it the right questions so it can generate useful and accurate results, and to fact-check its output.
That’s why Dan Petroski, the founder of and winemaker at Massican Winery in St. Helena, California, starts each day with a 10-minute conversation with a chatbot. His goal? To train it to mimic his tone and writing style so it can draft emails or newsletters in his voice.
“I try to respond to emails in 24 minutes or less and keep a clean inbox, and those A.I. tools integrated in Gmail allow me to be a little bit more efficient,” he says. He’s also used language models like Grammarly to help shape and modulate his tone in Massican newsletters.
For Petroski, one of the biggest benefits of A.I. tools is their ability to efficiently aggregate information from wide-ranging scientific and academic sources. He describes how he used to stare at the stack of Harvard Business Reviews that would pile up before he’d had a chance to read them. “Now, I’ve completely stopped reading that magazine. I go right into artificial intelligence as a search engine, and then I start to have conversations about the topic at hand.”
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All of these use cases require finesse and a combination of human and artificial intelligence. Petroski analyzes the results of any ChatGPT search, for instance, to see whether they ring true or are useful to his business. And, when typing a question into ChatGPT, “you have to be kind of elaborate to give it the bones of the structure of an argument,” he says.
At Tank, everyone on the marketing team keeps a ChatGPT tab open all day on their web browsers, Feuchuk says. They use the generative A.I. language tool to research blog posts, riff on social media captions and draft SEO or A.D.A.-compliant web copy. They test whether an A.I.-generated subject line encourages more people to open an email than one written by a human colleague. Other A.I. tools help them transcribe and edit videos and rework photos for different mediums.
“It’s not coming for your job,” Feuchuk says of A.I. technology. “It’s something you should use to be good at your job.”
Joel Peterson, the executive director of the Paso Robles Wine Alliance, sees how fluency with A.I. tools can make someone very valuable professionally. “I would bet that people in large organizations are looking to hire people who know how to use A.I. for their marketing departments,” he says. He’s inclined to do the same the next time he needs to fill that type of role.
Still, Peterson wonders how audiences with varying levels of digital savvy will respond to A.I.-generated communications. At this relatively early stage, few possess Petroski’s or Feuchuk’s expertise with A.I. tools, and there are bound to be missteps.
“Authenticity is especially important to Gen Z consumers,” Peterson adds, “and they’re really good at figuring it out when something isn’t quite right.”
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Authenticity might sound like a marketing buzzword, but it’s how a lot of people make their purchasing decisions. It’s extremely difficult to regain consumer trust once it’s lost, so the stakes for those experimenting with A.I. tools are high. In 2021, a Marketing Week survey found that 51% of consumers stopped purchasing from brands that they found were disingenuous about how they handled customer data and privacy.
Because A.I. tools are fairly new to most users, we don’t yet know their long-term effects, says Lola Olateju, a Brooklyn-based digital strategist and founder of the platform Black Girls Drink. “The managers and creators of new technology don’t always represent the people who are going to be impacted by that technology.”
This issue is currently playing out on the national stage. At Senate hearings this week, executives from Meta, TikTok and other tech companies testified about whether their products put children in danger and require further governmental regulation.
Olateju also believes that iterative language models like ChatGPT can easily disseminate misinformation or reinforce blindspots. “A.I. is only as good as the person who uses it, and it’s not an inherently inclusive tool. If the people drafting inputs into an A.I. language or product model aren’t already thinking, ‘How can we be more inclusive or reach an end goal that aligns with our values,’ the output of that A.I. tool will reflect the same.”
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For those eager to reach new audiences as wine sales and consumption decline across the U.S., closed-circuit communication is risky.
Others worry about the long-term impact that A.I. tools could have on the creativity and resiliency of the people using them. “You learn so much by failing, by trying out an idea that doesn’t work, so then you have to come up with something else,” says Adam Casto, head winemaker at Ehlers Estate in St. Helena, California.
Of course, that type of human trial and error takes time, and some wine professionals don’t feel they have any to spare. Headlines about the need to save the wine business from climate change, cannabis and beyond abound. Even the most even-keeled industry members are eager to find a quick fix.
A.I. tools aren’t that, Petroski warns. “Nothing here is a silver bullet,” he says. “They’re ways to aggregate existing issues or questions or conversations.”
At this point, whether or not we like the existence of A.I. tools in the workplace is beside the point. They’re already being used by the people who make, package and sell wine. “You’re either on the train or you’re on the tracks,” Feuchuk says of these new technologies.
An evocative metaphor for the digital economy writ large, his words might strike you as terrifying, thrilling or devastating apt. Either way, if you don’t like his turn of phrase, ChatGPT will happily suggest a few alternatives.
Published: February 5, 2024
