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| A.I. Still Struggles With Hands |
Artificial Intelligence has been with us for over a decade, with Nvidia and other software companies challenging traditional norms in creativity and beyond. Smelling Beach Walk by Maison Margiela, I can't help but wonder how many perfumes have been created by AI in that time. This one smells like a carbon copy of Tom Ford's Soleil Blanc — essentially a high-end suntan lotion scent. We've encountered this fragrance profile at least half a dozen times before: a jasmine/ylang bouquet with coconut and benzoin.
Can an AI perfume be identified by scent alone? I suspect I have a couple in my collection. Grassland by Banana Republic, for instance, smells like an AI-generated fragrance from start to finish. It's as if someone ran a gas chromatography analysis on Parfums de Marly's Greenley, fed the data into an AI composition tool, and voilà — Greenley on a budget, minus the expensive pine notes. It smells like a computer's take on seafoam green, with smooth mints and a vague freshness that avoids being generic or cheap. Beach Walk has a similar vibe, except it seems like a straightforward, slightly cheaper copy of the Tom Ford scent. Would a human perfumer even bother with that?
A growing concern with AI is its rapid learning and improvement — it’s evolving at a dizzying speed. Just a year ago, AI-generated imagery was grotesquely mediocre, but today the quality is worlds apart. Now, the only human input required is crafting keywords that yield the best result; the AI does the rest. AI has been capable of high-level generation since at least 2010, possibly earlier. Beach Walk dates back to 2012, and I wouldn't be surprised if the perfumers simply used Soleil Blanc’s formula as their prompt.