AI Sommelier Generates Wine Reviews without Ever Opening a Bottle

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May 03, 2022

Dear Reader, Wine reviews can be surprisingly poetic. Take this one: "It's not a deeply concentrated wine, but it's balanced neatly by a strike of lemon-lime acidity that lingers on the finish." Sounds pretty delicious—despite the fact that it was written by AI. This week's lead story covers the pros and cons of an algorithm that writes wine and beer reviews.

Sophie Bushwick, Associate Editor, Technology

Artificial Intelligence AI Sommelier Generates Wine Reviews without Ever Opening a Bottle A new algorithm writes wine and beer reviews that sound like they were penned by human critics. Is that a good thing? By Joanna Thompson

Defense The Navy Extracted a Jet Fighter from 12,400 Feet below the Surface of the South China Sea But the U.S. must probe even further to catch up with China's access to the ocean's deepest reaches By Jason Sherman

Engineering Record-Breaking Jumping Robot Can Leap a 10-Story Building To propel itself higher than any known engineered jumper or animal can, it had to ignore the limits of biology By Sophie Bushwick

Computing It's Time to Open the Black Box of Social Media Social media companies need to give their data to independent researchers to better understand how to keep users safe By Renée DiResta,Laura Edelson,Brendan Nyhan,Ethan Zuckerman

Engineering New Tech Conveys Emotional Touch Long-Distance Complex social information can be felt through a virtual touch By Richard Sima

Biotech Mysterious 'Retron' DNA Helps Scientists Edit Human Genes For the first time, researchers have used this bacterial tool to edit genes in human cells By Saugat Bolakhe

Computing Lost Women of Science Podcast, Season 2, Episode 5: La Jolla Klára Dán von Neumann encounters a new home, a new husband and a new project By Katie Hafner,The Lost Women of Science Initiative

Economics An Old-Fashioned Economic Tool Can Tame Pricing Algorithms Left unchecked, pricing algorithms might unintentionally discriminate and collude to fix prices By Ethan Wilk

Engineering These Three Overlooked Black Inventors Shaped Our Lives The innovators changed the nature of household work, industrial production and high technology By Ainissa Ramirez

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 326, Issue 5

QUOTE OF THE DAY "The researchers concluded that breed explains only 9 percent of behavioral variation among different dogs." Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American

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