Photo: Suzanne Sausville (WBZ)
EVERETT, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — Night Shift Brewing in Everett turned to an unlikely source for its latest craft beer—artificial intelligence.
Night Shift used controversial artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to create a recipe for a new beer. ChatGPT can mimic human speech and be used to answer questions, write essays, engage in conversations, and a wide variety of other functions.
At first, co-founder Robert Burns and the Night Shift team were not thrilled with how old-fashioned ChatGPT's initial recipe was.
"We asked, 'Hey, can you make it more modern, can you make it more fruity, can you make it more tropical?'" Burns told WBZ NewsRadio Friday. "And after some prompts, we got a recipe out of it and decided to show it to our head brewer Joe [Mashburn] and see if we could make it."
The chatbot also came up with the beer's name: AI-P-A, which according to Burns "has multiple plays on words and is just the perfect thing to encapsulate the whole project."
Night Shift used another AI program, Midjourney, to create the beer's label. Midjourney constructs images from user-generated text prompts, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E.
It's one thing for a computer to write a recipe, it's another for it to actually taste good. Burns told WBZ that AI-P-A and its notes of clementine, peach, and mango passed the taste test with flying colors.
"[It's] pretty light drinking, about 7.5% [ABV], so a little higher on the alcohol content, but really flavorful," Burns said. "I drank one last night and was thoroughly enjoying it."
As for Joe Mashburn, he's not nervous that ChatGPT will replace him as head brewer, but he did express some frustration at the speed of the AI's success.
"It was unnerving how it didn’t really take it two years to figure that out, like it did for me," said Mashburn.
WBZ's Suzanne Sausville (@WBZSausville) reports.
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