AI is taking over our lives. People are using it to write emails, plan holidays, compare products and, shockingly, tell them what they should and shouldn’t eat.
The future really is here, and it’s a complete minefield.
Ask ChatGPT whether an ingredient is healthy and the answer pretty much depends on the information the system has learned, along with anything it can access at the time.
That becomes a problem when so much of the information online is there for a reason: someone is selling something, promoting something, campaigning for something or trying to convince you that their version of events is the right one.
And we have been here before. For years, businesses have spent a fortune trying to get to the top of Google. SEO completely changed the way companies wrote online content because everyone wanted to be top of the page.
Now, we are starting to see the same battle with AI.
Brands want to be mentioned in answers while influencers want their views to reach further. Governments and politicians also understand the value of shaping a narrative. So, as a result, everyone is fighting for space in the same enormous pool of information.
The problem is that the loudest voice is not always the right one. The companies and organisations with the biggest budgets can create more content, promote it harder and make their version of a story far more visible. Social media has already given us a pretty good preview of where this can lead. Algorithms reward strong opinions, outrage and content that makes people stop scrolling.
“The science is complicated and there are several sides to this argument” is hardly going to set TikTok on fire.
“Never eat these five ingredients” probably will.
Food is the perfect target for this. Almost anything on the back of a packet can be made to sound confusing if you remove enough context. Throw in a complicated sounding ingredient and you are halfway to a viral video.
Everybody eats food and everybody has an opinion on it, whether they understand the science or not. Social media is full of influencers pushing food narratives when they have no background in food or nutrition. The ultra-processed food debate is a good example. There are questions being asked about health and the types of foods people consume, and those questions are totally relevant. But the online debate often strips away all the context and reduces the issue to “processed food is bad”.
That is where I think the conversation becomes unhelpful.
Processing is not automatically a negative thing. Food has always been processed in one form or another, whether that is cooking, fermenting, preserving, blending or drying. Modern food manufacturing also relies on ingredients that perform very specific jobs, from maintaining quality and consistency to improving shelf life, taste and texture. Not to mention making sure the food and drink we eat is safe.
Simple messages travel well because they are easier to understand, easier to remember and much easier to repeat. More posts appear, more articles get written and more people quote those articles. Before you know it, the same claim is everywhere.
Then somebody asks AI.
At that point, the AI platform of choice must make sense of genuine scientific evidence alongside an enormous amount of commentary, opinion and repetition. Something being highly visible does not automatically make it true, but from the outside it can certainly start to look that way.
I think this becomes really important when AI moves into the supermarket aisle. People are already picking up a product, photographing the ingredients list and asking their phone whether anything in there is ‘bad’.
Suddenly, there is another voice sitting between the food manufacturer and the consumer. An AI system could then simply reflect the loudest online narrative reinforcing that view rather than explain what the ingredient actually does and why it is there. We spend an enormous amount of time in this industry talking about traceability. We want to know where ingredients came from, who supplied them, where they were manufactured and what happened to them along the way.
Maybe we need to start treating information in much the same way.
AI is going to become a bigger part of how people choose food, there is no getting away from it. The challenge for our industry is making sure complicated subjects do not get reduced to simple labels such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘natural’ or ‘processed’.
Food is more complicated than that, and the information AI gives consumers needs to reflect it.
