Earlier this week, Narragansett Beer took to social media with a mea culpa for the generative artificial intelligence (AI) age. It read (all sic throughout):

CANNED! we saw the feedback, yall were right. Robots are dumb. ⁠
⁠
Plz like this so we can beat the bot content and its fancy analytics.

The image attached to the post was a deliberately low-fidelity collage showing the “prohibited” symbol over a man with a robot head. “Our AI Social Media Robot has been FIRED,” the graphic proclaimed.

I wasn’t able to get a hold of anybody at Narragansett to discuss the nature of the “feedback” on such short notice. But using context clues, it wasn’t hard to form a guess as to what happened. On May 4 — “Star Wars Day” — the venerable Rhode Island brand posted an AI-generated image of two ‘Gannies having a light-saber fight in full “Star Wars” regalia. Its followers, confronted by replacement-grade slop from a brand that holds itself out as “made on honor,” responded in no uncertain terms. Some representative comments:

For shame. The water wasted making this image could have been spent on making beer

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Please don’t AI my Narragansett.

So disappointing for real “made on honor” LOL

take this ugly shit down

Gansett pls no 🙁

You get the gist. People love beer, they hate slop, and if they have their druthers, ne’er the ‘twain shall meet.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I too have a dim view of AI. I’m troubled by the ways large language models (LLMs) produce gunk that degrades our already-dismal information ecosystem and overburdens the open web’s aging infrastructure. I’m repulsed by the contemptuous disregard for democracy on display among the technology’s biggest boosters, and how it is being used to further the Trump administration’s fascist project. I’m skeptical of the most alarming claims about AI-oriented data centers’ water use, but I’m confident that communities desperate for affordable electricity, good schools, and clean air will not achieve any of those things by putting themselves in hock to private equity-backed hyperscalers. Not to mention the plainly upwardly redistributive nature of its economic model, which uses exploited labor in the Global South to run mechanical Turk-style schemes to empower labor discipline and mass layoffs by rapacious executives for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy.

Still, Hop Take is not a column about my relationship to Silicon Valley’s rising technofascism. It’s a column about the beer industry. I have watched with morbid curiosity over the past 18-ish months as craft breweries in particular have negotiated their own relationships with this emergent software. You might assume that the industry — composed overwhelmingly of small, creative, independent, outfits that have made their smallness, creativity, and independence load-bearing components of their pitch to consumers — would be categorically opposed to a technology built on a few hypercapitalized corporations hoovering up the intellectual property of the world and spitting it back out as uncannily homogenized sludge for their own profit.

As Narragansett learned the hard way, many consumers certainly assume that. After all, a brewery that holds out its beer as a literal and figurative “craft” seems to be communicating certain values about its production and provenance that are antithetical to clunky, pat LLM copy and soulless labels.

“Breweries who use AI for labels, logos, or marketing materials […] If they can’t dedicate the proper resources to those things, what other corners are they cutting when it comes to brewing methods, ingredients, taproom service practices, and things like that?” says Chris O’Leary, editor of the long-running blog Brew York, in a recent text exchange. The impossibly well-traveled blogger recently came across a flyer for a beer festival in the Empire State that included apparently “hallucinated” logos for participating breweries. (The festival, Tap NY, appears to have since updated the poster with the correct logos; it did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“I’ve always thought the bare minimum a beer festival would offer is promotion and exposure for a brewery and their brand, but apparently that’s too much to ask for in the era of AI,” O’Leary says.

It shouldn’t be. A recent NBC News poll has AI running worse than Immigration and Customs Enforcement among respondents. (The same poll shows it slightly more popular than “Iran” and “The Democratic Party,” the latter of which has been pissing its anti-AI base off in part because it’s trying to avoid pissing off the multi-million-dollar pro-AI lobby.) But even though rank-and-file drinkers may shun slop, portions of the craft brewing industry have clearly been taken in by AI software’s promises of time-saving, cost-cutting instant gratification.

If you haven’t noticed it, well, designers who have worked in the segment certainly have.

“I see it everywhere,” says Em Sauter, the author and artist behind the drinks-education platform Pints & Panels, in a phone interview earlier this spring. In mid-March, her illustrated cartoon about the depressing breadth of brewery adoption of AI imagery garnered hundreds of comments on her social media accounts, which are popular with industry types.

“I feel like, as an artist, you’re in this nightmare where you’re stuck in this room and it’s like ‘Clockwork Orange’” Sauter adds, referring to the iconic scene where the main character was brainwashed by being having his eyes pried open with metal spanners and forced to watch scenes of human violence. While she hasn’t yet experienced Pints and Panels losing clients who decide they’re better off designing labels, packaging, or other visual materials with ChatGPT et al., the proliferation and predatory marketing of these programs has begun to seep into the way some clients communicate with her.

The first time Sauter received a brief of a project that was generated with AI, she found it novel. “I was like, ‘Oh, this was helpful,” she recalls. “But then I drew what the AI [brief] wanted, and [the client said ‘But that doesn’t look like your style.’” It wasn’t: she’d simply followed the instructions in the brief, which the client clearly hadn’t read very closely before sending it off to her. “It was a learning lesson for me: AI is the base, and then I can work from there,” she says. “It’s just…” she trails off, as though unable to articulate her exasperation.

Sauter’s design colleague recently took a stab at it. “I can’t trust briefs anymore,” Matt Tanaka, the founder and chief executive of Stout Collective, wrote in a LinkedIn post in mid-April. In an attached video, he elaborated: “It’s like an added layer of discovery that I have to do when a brief comes in, and I have to decide one was this written by AI, and if it was, is it something that the client actually believes.”

At CODO Design, Isaac Arthur knows the feeling. How many of the Indianapolis firm’s clients are now using the programs to generate all or part of their design briefs? “I want to say 100 percent,” he says in a recent phone interview, chuckling. While Arthur does not use AI to produce client work, he “tries not to judge any of this stuff […] But I’m not going to support someone that does something I don’t agree with or like.”

Like Sauter, Arthur is fairly confident that CODO has not lost work as a direct result of the AI boom. The lower-hanging fruit that a brewery might be able to pluck itself with an LLM is, in a sense, below the paygrade for a firm that has put in almost two decades of work to develop its book. At this point, Arthur says, “We’re not doing, [for example] $200 labels and logos, we’re doing brand strategy, deeper dives, refreshes, repositioning, architecture, and stuff like that.” This is a hard-won spot in the catbird seat, mind you: CODO has for years published extensive branding tracts and newsletters for free, as well as “The Beyond Beer Handbook.” But as the lowest-common-denominator work gets vaporized by Sam Altman and company, that effort has been a bulwark, and CODO is thriving. Just this month, the agency signed on its 100th brewery as a client.

“I don’t think the shift so far has been so black and white, cut and dry, as choosing between AI and an artist,” says Tanaka in a phone interview earlier this spring. “It is changing the mindset of the person hiring a designer. What they’re now thinking may be ‘a designer isn’t worth as much because there is a free option.’ Obviously, that free option sucks, but that is still an option.”

This is the rub. Like carpentry, litigation, and virtually every trade in between, the design industry depends in part on a pipeline of talent at various levels of skill — and jobs at various degrees of complexity to be done at those levels. Supply has never cleanly matched demand, least of all in creative fields. But while designers who already have an established track record and a client list in the craft brewing industry may be insulated from craft brewers’ dalliances with slop, it may still lower the floor. And younger workers who used to cut their teeth on those $200 jobs will get fewer bites at the apple.

“If I’m giving advice to someone coming out of school, or someone that’s a junior designer, that would be, ‘do not go out on your own,’” says Jim Dumas of Massachusetts’ Fat Basset Design, in a phone interview. The longtime graphic designer got his start years ago banging out table tents and other collateral for Samuel Adams brand, but wonders how much of that work will remain in human hands long term. “It’s just going to be tougher,” he says. “‘I think it comes back to [the idea that] you have to create in a way that AI cannot create.’” (And of course, hope that clients are buying.)

“You probably don’t want to be in art school right now,” adds Arthur.

Of all the designers I spoke with for this column, Brian Winkeler, founder of the ironically named Robot House of Oklahoma City, is certainly the most open AI hater. (He runs an entire website about it, in fact: FUAI.sucks.) Incidentally, he’s also the one who has pulled back the most from client work in the craft brewing industry. “With the state of the industry, we’re kind of holding off,” he tells me by phone earlier this spring. It’s not just the AI of it all, of course. The segment’s struggles are well-documented, money is tight, and Robot House has to fish where the fish are. But Winkeler still keeps an eye on the trade, and expresses some bafflement that craft brewers — those supposed standard-bearers of anticorporate originality and artisanship — would take even the shallowest sip of slop.

“If you’ve got a really great beer, I think, you’re hobbling it, generative AI or not, with bad branding and ugly design,” Winkeler says. “But the idea of letting an algorithm generate this [imagery] that’s supposed to represent you and your brand and your product, there’s a huge disconnect there.”

Cognitive dissonance has never stopped the craft-brewing industry before. But you can’t sell beer to customers that won’t buy it. If nobody flags the “disconnect” of using low-fidelity AI to market high-fidelity beer during the design process, drinkers may do so in the aisle.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

A flavored malt beverage (FMB) was the hottest thing in hard tea — until it wasn’t. FMBs had the inside track on hard sports drinks — until they didn’t. And hard lemonade, which FMB Mike’s Hard had virtually to itself for two decades, is slipping out of brewers’ grasp, too. A competitive analysis of NIQ scan data by Bump Williams Consulting first reported by BevNET found that nearly all the growth in the still-growing segment is coming from wine- or spirits-based drinks. FMB lemonades lost almost 13-share in the 52 weeks through April 11 to the Surfsides, Lucky Ones, and BeatBoxes of the world. Sour!

📈 Ups…

For the first time in 21 months, the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s buying index was fully in the black… George Clooney-backed nonalcoholic beer brand Crazy Mountain raised $15 million (albeit in part from entities related to its founders)… Molson Coors paid $275 million for Atomic Brands, so despite being an underwhelming acquisition at least it came in under budget… Anheuser-Busch InBev finally and fully stopped the bleeding from its Bud Light fiasco of 2023…

📉 …and downs

Convenience-store chains are seeing ~600 applicants for 10 shelf spaces in fall and spring resets these days, per a Global Partners exec… The Lord Hobo/Lone Pine platform Evergreen Collective is shifting to contract brewing and laying off 18 workers at its 100,000-barrel-a-year plant in Massachusetts… UFC will hold five fights under the Bud Light banner this summer as part of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s existing $100-million deal with the MAGA-aligned promotion… The long-rumored Keystone Light Apple (Klapple?) is here with a juiceless AI slop campaign…

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