AI Casts a Pall Over the Wine Writing World, and It’s Mostly Your (Our) Fault – 1WineDude.com

Well, it seems that AI is all the rage in the news lately (even my now 99 year old cousin was asking me about it), and wouldn’t ya know it, just a few days after I waxed pseudo-philosophically about wine writing online in the age of agentic browsing traffic comes news that a winner of one of the more notable wine communication awards seems to have been written by AI.

There is no shortage of sounding off on this topic, so I will refrain from recounting the full details here; go read about them, we’ll wait for you, I promise.

This little row has cast a pall over the latest 67 Pall Mall Wine Awards (I CANNOT fathom how no one has made this joke yet???), of which, you might recall, I played a very minor part (in the awards, not necessarily in the pall or the row). Per usual, we might be asking the wrong questions in this debate, though.

To be clear, the awards made no mention of AI-generated work in their submission process, from what I recall. So we are witnessing another instance of the “AI = BAD!!!” stance that is, I suspect, almost a subconscious, lizard-brain reaction from writers who feel threatened by LLMs. That’s understandable, but not excusable. Remember, I came up professionally through corporate IT, and so tools like AI don’t necessarily scare me (the actions of the companies that profit from it, those do scare the hell out of me).

AI LLMs have gotten insanely better since I lambasted them (from a wine context) waaaaaayyyy back in… 2024. I consider them a near-indispensable tool for my money-making work. I have, on occasion, used them to write posts for 1WD, though they still require heavy editing to get the voice right. So I get why people feel threatened; but that does not mean that all AI is bad, and it stands to reason, in fact, that AI has just as much promise to improve our lives as it does to hunt us to extinction, Terminator style.

The rub in the 67 Pall Mall Awards row is, in my opinion, that the winning piece in question is just arguably not a very good piece of writing; to me, it seems like a potentially cool idea that did not get edited properly and needed some rework to make it more personal. So, one could argue that it’s kind of banal; but the author did NOT destabilize the atom and horribly mutate the DNA of defenseless kittens simply because she might have used AI to draft it.

This whole thing calls the judging of the awards more into question, perhaps. But AI is just a tool; most of its first draft writing stinks because most online writing stinks (by extension, most online wine writing stinks). That is not AI’s fault, it is just doing what we are telling it to do.

I would argue that stones ought not to be thrown just because something has AI content in it, because I can assure you with the utmost certainty that most of what you read online is going to have some AI content in it and that day is coming VERY soon. You want more human writing? Support human writing – fucking pay for it and give companies an incentive to pay half-decent wages for its creation.

Cheers!