Asking the Web about the musky chardonnay that I know a little about having tasted in Ontario, I said to myself: let’s push intellectual laziness further, just to be comfortable and on the same level as the times. How ? Simply by stimulating the famous “conversational agent prototype using artificial intelligence defined as a fine-tuned language model using supervised learning and reinforcement learning techniques” to further describe what the musky chardonnay. I was not at the end of my troubles, even if Wikipedia mentions ChatGPT as being the editorial novelty of the hour.
Obviously, the following column was not written using any language model reconstituted by ChatGPT. There are limits to abusing the credulity of these precious people who reread the texts To have to and of those who, like you, read them in stride. Proof of this is this disjointed text that I spare you, proposed by the prototype in question, where it is mentioned that this famous chardonnay musk is what it is not, however, namely a “muskrat”, of the “sweat Chevaline”, “Muscat”, “musk roses” or even a “commune of Chardonnay in Burgundy”. We are far from the “aromatic mutation of Chardonnay” claimed in the definition of the famous grape variety. With such quick-wittedness, there is no longer any need for intelligence, even artificial! And no more need for journalists either.
But the column of the collaborator Alain McKenna published on January 9 goes further with the proposal of the TikTok platform soon to be offered in “Odorama”. The contraption behind the patent? Basically: the creation and dispersion of “olfactory trails” – fresh, human, earthy, green, lemony, floral, gourmand and woody – added to a video by means of “a necklace at the end of which we installed a generator of ‘smells operating much like an inkjet printer’. How about an inkjet capable of painting by numbers with that?
Creating an olfactory memory is not done by whistling TikTok. It imprints itself on us over time, subtly, over memories. But this memory just as spontaneously unpacks the “information” when you need it, like a vital reflex to better grasp the particular environment contained in the glass of wine you are sniffing.
You then perceive everything in an “objective” mode, the register of your inner olfactory library already guaranteeing a certain integrity, even a precise recognition of the olfactory molecules in question. A bit like the result of gas phase or thin layer chromatography, the scientific value of which is certainly indisputable, not to say of diabolical precision, but which, applied to the world of wine, presents a lack of lyricism and poetry to make a duck cry in a winter rain in Dublin.
Obviously, what TikTok offers is an olfactory video game where the pleasure released is consolidated by the suggestive aromatic framework proposed. Virtual immersion makes you walk in an orchard or enter a pastry shop? We’ll suggest shades of cherry, cut hay or fresh dung, or even vanilla puff pastry, lemon pastry cream or rum babas, flavors that you’ll adopt right away, because you won’t have a choice. A taking hostage of your senses, certainly harmless, but which you then dub without complaining, as if the whole thing seemed irrefutably obvious to you. In short, you feel what you are told to feel. Without a molecule of effort.
The tasting host bears the brunt of it despite himself when he presents a wine to an assembly that swallows the suggestion like a bird would a worm offered by its mother. He talks to you about faded rose and tar to describe an old Piedmontese Nebbiolo, lychee and basil to suggest a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc or Tagada strawberry to evoke the Gamay of a Beaujolais and you adhere unconditionally to the proposal before even to have consulted yourself on what you piff. You are, in short, manipulated without your knowledge. Whether on the editorial level or on the tasting level, I still prefer, personally, to keep control of what I feel, what I think and what I communicate. Otherwise, what good would a wine critic be?