THE DRAYMAN

Artificial intelligence

Here’s what you get when you ask a computer to design a craft beer can

I’m always a bit wary of anything that admits to have been created with the help of artificial intelligence, ever since a craft distiller claimed to have done just that to come up with a gin called Monker’s Garkel.

A bit of Google digging revealed that monker was urban slang for someone who looks like a monkey, and garkel was a term for a 19th century slave master’s abode in the deep south. Not so much artificial intelligence as a very real lack of it.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached Dream Factory, a beer for which London brewer Two Tribes used AI to design the can.

It did so by inviting followers to use an online AI-image generator called Midjourney, on the Discord platform, to submit ideas. It’s effectively a drawing and painting bot for people who can’t draw or paint. You type in a short description of the image you’d like to come to life, and in a few seconds it gives you four alternatives.

I experimented myself. The T&Cs prevent me sharing the image that came up for “Cambridge Wine Merchants as it would appear at daybreak on Saturn”, but it did come up with various representations of a shop with what was identifiable as wine in its windows against a sunrise backdrop, as if drawn by prog rock album cover illustrator Roger Dean, but with the name misspelt as four variations on the theme of “CAAIISTRAIA”. A request for images of a man serving craft beer to a woman in a wine shop was a little more successful, with four options that could quite happily usurp clip art on a retailer’s email newsletter.

Two Tribes had 1,800 submissions for its beer can over a two-week period, eight of which were smashed together to create a pack in the brewer’s trademark pop art style. It’s certainly a striking design, though presumably the manual task of whittling down the entries was more time-consuming than the traditional small business route of getting Sue from accounts’ lad to knock something up because he’s studying graphic design at night school.

Still, it would be an interesting exercise to see what young Olly would come up with given the successful briefs given to Midjourney, which included “lemon with Elvis hair detailed polaroid”, “knitted hotdog” and “Indian Andy Warhol hops on T-shirt mango pants 16 eyes 2 pairs of polka dot glasses”.

The press blurb put out on behalf of the brewery even mentioned design elements that didn’t make the can – “Brian Blessed behaving like an otter” – but, alas, without ever mentioning what the beer tastes like.

True, it sometimes feels like the design of craft beer cans has become almost as important as the liquid contents in recent years, though brewers forget the latter at their peril. The can might achieve your first sale, but only the quality of the beer will gain your second.

It’s easy to be cynical of course, but reference to the taste would have given cause to take the exercise more seriously. Though “this sort of thing” may well become a conventional design tool in the future, at the moment it’s difficult to see it as anything but an artificial gimmick.