Dear Mr. Cola [Y3000 Edition]

Dear Mr. Cola,

It has been two months since my last letter.

This letter, somehow, marks the sixth (!) time I’ve written to you about one of your “fine” products. It’s a shame, really - despite all my missives asking after your well-being and mental health, given the acid-addled product decisions you’ve been making, I haven’t heard back from you even once. I’d hoped that by now, we’d be… if not pen pals, at least acquainted on a slightly more personal level, but alas, so far it is not yet to be.

I wonder, Mr. Cola, if you’ve been offended that I haven’t really shared much in the way of personal details about myself? If you’ve been hurt that I would make assumptions about your character, your substance abuse, your either aloof or rage-fueled micromanage-y executive style?

Well! I recently acquired a bottle of your newest conceptual soda, your “Y3000 Futuristic Flavored” cola, which proudly proclaims to be “Co-Created with Artificial Intelligence.” Now that I am sitting down to write you, I would like to share with you two salient personal details which have aided me in understanding, and reviewing, this newest conceptual beverage.

First of all, I grew up in the swamps of South Jersey, at six feet above sea level, and my closest big city - and thus where I went for culture - was the lovely and shining city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the 90s, as a teenager, Philadelphia’s “alternative” rock radio station – ah, Mr. Cola, remember those halcyon days before all radio stations had been bought by Clear Channel and each city’s stations reflected the nature of the city? What days those were! – was called Y100, 100.3 mHz on the FM dial, and that station’s songs are baked even harder into my noodle than its predecessor, Eagle 106, which sadly became a smooth jazz station just before Enter Sandman came out. Otherwise, I’m sure Eagle 106 would be what I think of when I think of the 90s, and not Y100… whose branding, you might note, is very similar to your conceptual cola’s branding.

I assume this is a coincidence. I assume, sir, that you’re worried about appealing to The Kids, and you have looked out over the popular culture and said to yourself, “what do The Kids think of when they think of Futuristic?” And then, since you have zero idea what The Kids actually like or think is cool, and are also presumably surrounded by a cadre of yes-men from whom you will purge members at the slightest hint of even hesitation to praise your newest idea, you said to yourself “Ah, The Kids think my good friend Elon Musk is the future!”

And once that thought had entered your mind, sir, no one would hold you back! You looked at Musk’s wildly unsuccessful rebranding of Twitter as X, and said IT IS TIME but you couldn’t use X, so what’s better than the letter next to it in the alphabet? So Y it was! And then let’s just tack on a number afterwards, because if your conceptual soda sounds like a Terminator model then so much the better - FUTURISTIC!

One aside, sir – as I stated earlier, I don’t really know anything about you, so I don’t know if you’ve had children or are still planning on having children. If you are planning on having children, then please sir, do not take another page from Mr. Musk’s book and name your newborn son Y Æ A-Yii. First of all, it’s terribly derivative; second of all, his classmates will make fun of him forever; and third of all, it’s just too close to something that Bruce Willis as John McClain would say to a bad guy in one of the Die Hard movies, just before he blows him up. Please, sir, use some restraint; given some of the colas you’ve been making recently, I don’t know if you have any left in you, but by the gods, sir, think of the children. Or just the child.

The second thing that you don’t know about me, sir, but does make me qualified to review this soda, is that though I moonlight as a food reviewer, my day job is that of a Data Architect. I don’t actually design machine learning algorithms, but I have more than a passing familiarity with them; my main job is building out data structures and data flows so that data can be passed to the Data Scientists who build and implement the algorithms. As you might imagine, I have many opinions on what is laughingly called Artificial Intelligence!

And so, Mr. Cola, these are the two personal lenses that I will be viewing this particular soda through: my actual industry knowledge of just how inherently crappy most Artificial Intelligence data training sets (and, as a direct result, their output) are, and with as many references to early 90s alternative rock as I can possibly dredge from my rapidly degrading memory. And so, with All Apologies and no further ado, let us begin.

With any of these conceptual sodas, it is important to consider what the Common People might think of when they meditate on the concept. What would, say, a Seven Nation Army think about the future? Are we casting our minds back to the 90s and considering futures from then, or are we considering futures from now? The thing about Futuristic visions of the 90s is… none of them were very nice. Aliens, Strange Days, Blade Runner, The Matrix – all of that cyberpunky stuff was dark, gritty, greasy, and nasty. Certainly that couldn’t be what you would ask your LLM to generate for this cola!

So would it be a Futuristic vision from now? Blade Runner, The Matrix, Don’t Look Up, The Peripheral, The Hunger Games, Silo, Twisted Metal. Still dark, gritty, greasy, and nasty. Shit. As I considered all of these possible futures, I realized that your LLM had probably been trained on all of these Futuristic media properties, and You Oughta Know that a deep fear began to well up from my Heart Shaped Box.

And so, sir, I finally uncapped the soda. As the carbonation hissed away, I wondered, will it actually Smell Like Teen Spirit? Will it smell Just Like Heaven? Will this soda be Epic, or will I Lose My Religion and have Faith No More? Alas, I had let it warm up, and as it fizzed it sprayed cola like a Champagne Supernova across my Wonderwall and I had to pause to clean up the mess. But then, Tonight Tonight, I dove right back in! What I Got was a cola that smells Closer to your original Coca-Cola products than the other conceptual colas did, but on multiple sniff-tests a hint of mint did Creep in.

So far, sir, this is not Pretty Fly For a Cola Y (3000).

As I stared in fear and apprehension with a dash of Panic at the still unzipped bottle, I considered what data set you may have used to train an LLM to design this product, I wondered what you knew about data sets for machine learning. It was an actual and honest shock to me, sir, when I started learning about how to build data sets for machine learning, and the industry best practices for what you should do when you’re missing data is “just make shit up.” I won’t go into too much detail, but – at least in the trainings I’ve done, which include O’Reilly books, which are generally considered top tier – data scientists are actually taught that that’s the best thing to do. I’m not messing with you. As I considered dark and gritty futures, and the mint aroma that comes off this soda of yours, I began to suspect that perhaps, just perhaps, your data sets had been assembled by folks who were implementing industry best practices. Which – I was shook, in this Semi-Charmed Life of mine.

And so, there was nothing left for it but to cautiously raise the bottle to my lips and give it a try. Good Charlotte! This soda is truly a Bitter Sweet Symphony of flavors, sir, and not in a way anyone would call Feel Good Inc. As is your right, you don’t tell us what natural flavors you put in this soda, but aside from the mint, and the much deeper caramel flavor than you find in your normal Coca-Cola Classic, there is an unmistakable taste, one of my least favorite flavors on the planet: diacetyl. Yes, diacetyl, the classic beer flaw, the slick and greasy and pungent fake liquid butter that you pour all over your popcorn at the movie theater right before you step into the theater to watch Titanic for the twelfth time.

This soda, sir, is not good. This soda is Sabotage. This soda is not My Personal Jesus. Positing a quest in my life, if I were searching for my favorite soda, then I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. I do not want this soda to Come Out And Play. This soda is, in all ways, a Failure.

And yet, sir, we can still learn something – or at least confirm something – from this conceptual soda, because as far as I am aware this is the first physical mass market product that I have seen that was “Created With Artificial Intelligence.” You may note that I dropped the “Co-” from that phrase, because as soon as you’ve tasted this soda, you know that the only “Co-” involved was the prompt engineer, which I still cannot believe is a real job. At the behest of your marketing department, your “prompt engineer” (vomit) obviously got ChatGPT to crap out a recipe, and said “meh fine” and handed it to your Flavor Scientists and then got right back to wondering why they even took this job in the first place.

So what can we learn here? Your company, sir, has produced six or more conceptual sodas in the last few years, and this most recent entry is, by far, the absolute worst of them. By leaps and bounds. I thought the +XP soda would be the worst; this one laps the others like an Olympic runner might beat a six year old in a race. This soda might be the perfect example of why it is a terrible idea to use AI without guardrails - given your company’s family-friendly image, I can’t imagine that what you actually wanted to imagine a dark, gritty, greasy, nasty future, yet you have conjured a soda that tastes more like the engine room of the boat in Waterworld than anything in any hopepunk story.

This feels, in certain ways, like the final iteration of your conceptual soda products, because by this point, I have to imagine that releasing all these shit-tier flavors of your signature product has got to be actually eating into your brand value… but then again, as we established, you are friends with Mr. Musk, and we’ve seen how little anyone in your social tranche seems to care about brand value, so maybe you’re actually enjoying burning it all down? Either way, I probably won’t be writing you again; our lack of even a hint of an actual personal relationship after all these entreaties, and both how little enjoyment you’re getting out of these new products of yours, and how little enjoyment I get from them, means that unless you find something truly egregious for your next conceptual cola… well. Let’s just sum it up with: I’ve said my piece.

And so, sir, I sign off with a handcrafted, artisanal farewell, designed just for you, a pop culture mashup of your newest child’s name and the bowdlerized tv edit of the famous John McClain line that I remember from my childhood:

Y Æ A-Yii, Mister Falcon!

Alex Parise