The Future of Wine Writing and Thinking Under AI

Writing is the physical manifestation of thought and thinking

Writing is the physical manifestation of thought and thinking. Of this I am sure.

Writing is also a means of sharpening your thinking and even evolving it. I worry that the increased use of artificial intelligence for writing by those who write regularly and who are learning to write will degrade our collective ability to think well. More importantly, for this audience, my concern is that the inevitable increased use of AI for writing about wine and writing wine reviews will degrade the genre into a terrible sameness.

My concern about AI’s impact on wine writing (and the thinking that must go into it) is only due to my involvement with this genre. Knowing my convictions, I’d have the same concern about fiction writing, children’s writing, biographies or cookbook prose if those were my fields. But having been among the most prolific writers in this field for the past two decades, I feel a certain amount of ownership, and this heightens my concern.

My most basic concern is that as humans cede writing to AI, we become worse thinkers. Or at least we will produce fewer great thinkers. Outside the field of physics, where many of the best-known “geniuses” reside, the best thinkers among us have been identified by their writing, which was more often than not quite brilliant. Here I’m thinking of Dickinson, Orwell, Emerson, Twain, Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Plato, Du Bois, Faulkner, Roth, and Baldwin.

And in the realm of wine writing, we can see a genius for thinking in the works of Fisher, Asher, Kramer, Parker, Theise, and Feiring.