Coca-Cola's New AI-Generated Soda Flavor Falls Flat

I have so many questions, none of which are answered by the article. Was the flavor really picked by an AI? If so, how did they train the AI? What kind of AI was this? What other flavors did it come up with? Did they try a bunch of them and this was the best one they could get?

This whole thing just screams marketing stunt to me, and not a particularly good one. I can't wait for this whole AI thing to just die out already. How is it that every tech fad seems to somehow end up being even dumber than the previous one (although I think the whole NFT thing might have set a new low bar)?

You mean to tell me that a flavour designed by an algorithm that can't taste or smell, or even actually think, is bad? I'm shocked.

Wow no shit, it's going to be very annoying to see every single company try to slap AI onto their product in order to market it until the hype dies down

The problem probably was that Coke isn't in the soda creating business. People already drink a ridiculous amount of sodas. Coke is in the soda cheapening business, the only thing left for them to do is cut corners until making soda costs nothing. New sodas are just an opportunity for them to redefine cheap to a new low. This is why you should buy independent, small scale soda companies. Their entire business model is making something better than Coke.

The last few flavors they came out with that were supposedly not AI created also sucked.

See Futurama already explored this problem with Bender. As a robot, he can't taste food, but he learned the secret to Ultimate Flavor. It's hallucinogenics. Coca-Cola co. forgot to drop acid into their AI-generated soda. And I'm not talking about the kind that strips rust off of bumpers. Coke has enough of that in it already.

This is the sort of idea I'd have expected from Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock

The Prompt: "AI, create a soda flavor!"

The response: "Heres a recipe for a soda flavor... 1C corn syrup, 2C carbonated water, 1tsp your choice of food coloring. I could have prefaced this recipe with 10 paragraphs explaining the history of soda littered with browser breaking ads, but I am not a sociopath."

Chatgpt can be a cool way to generate ideas for flavours. It's ultimately a tool. That means there needs to be someone to actually test, tweak and verify those ideas, which at that point it's no longer AI generated.

Surprising no one.

I was really hoping this was an article with early sales numbers showing it's a flop. I already assumed it was going to taste bad, that feels like a given to me. I want it to be a failure in sales so this kind of thing stops happening.

Coke Y3000 sounds like it was supposed to be the kind of thing that would be used in a metaverse tie-in promo.

Can't wait until my King Arthur AI-Generated Flour turns out to be a 5 pound bag of uncut cocaine.

i'm gonna give you marketing geniuses a call when i need a Future Coke..

it'll be in The Future..

Ok, but I read that sentence near the beginning as "The massive beverage company has trapped an artificial intelligence to serve as its advisor" and I think it'd be neat if corporations had to patiently lie in wait for an unsuspecting AI to come along and bait it with some tasty data before they can use it.

What Coke offshoots have actually landed? Like Zero, Diet, Cherry, Vanilla and maybe Lemon?

You can taste the silicon!

MSG and truffle oil with a splash of hazelnut spread

The flavor tasted like a sprite but with a fruity aftertaste to me. Honestly didn’t know any ai involvement with the drink when I initially got it I just like trying the coke creations flavors. Starlight was still my favorite.

I don't think it was a bad flavor, it tasted like if you went to one of these Coke Freestyle machine and mixed a little bit of every flavor of Coca Cola together: A generically sweet, artificial fruity flavor.

The packaging are pretty cool though.

It's unfortunate too. This is actually my favorite flavor they have released.

I guess they didn't learn from their Coke Classicdebacle.

Is it bad that I liked it more than anything else they've done?

From how ambiguous it all is about an AI-generated soda flavor, I wouldn't be surprised if gizmodo also used an AI again to write this story.

I bought some of the Zero Calorie kind this weekend.

My friends and I thought it tasted pretty good, honestly. What I COULDN’T find were full sized cans of it. I wanted to buy a 12 pack, but could only find the little cans in a 10 pack.

That said, one of my friends bought a 20oz of the regular, super sugar kind. And…I didn’t like it as much. The zero calorie one tasted better to me 100%.

This Alan guy is just digging his claws into anything is he?