Thursday, September 14, 2023

Coke's New Y3000 Flavor is a Metaphor for Everything Wrong with AI

 

Coca-Cola has been creating a variety of special flavors lately. They don't have an official taste but instead are supposed to make your tastebuds think you're looking up at a starry sky, floating through a dreamworld, or other esoteric concepts. The latest flavor of Coke to hit the shelves is Y3000. It was co-created with various artificial intelligence programs that assisted in designing the cans/bottles and concocting the flavor. There is an app that uses AI to alter your photos in, "Futuristic," ways too, apparently. The claim that AI helped create this soda is possibly an exaggeration, but it would be fitting thematically. Like an AI=created picture/piece of, "Art," the Y3000 flavor seems okay at first, but the more you look at it/taste it the more apparent it becomes something is horribly wrong.

You know those, "Freestyle," soda machines some restaurants have? Imagine if you got the Coke soda and put in a bit of every fruit flavor mixed with Coke you could? A bit of orange, a dash of grape, and so forth until you're left with something that tastes like Coke with a bunch of citrus sludge. That is the Y3000 flavor. Much like how AI will give pictures too many fingers and just looks, "Off," once you study something created by AI closely, as you continue to sip Y3000 it obviously is a Frankenstein's monster of flavors in the same way AI, "Art," just rips off content it finds online to supposedly make something new. It's all oversaturated sludge both visually and in flavor. Some people seem to like the kitchen sink-style blend, but it isn't for me. At least it is still better than the Georgia Peach and California Raspberry flavors from some years ago. Not by much, however. I understand that Coke wants to, "Test boundaries." That said, this is one test they failed.

1 out of 5 stars.

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