The Green Milk Incident: When AI Lacks Context

Subject: Food-tech firm NotCo and its AI system "Giuseppe", working on development of plant-based milk.

"The milk came out green. Giuseppe had detected properties in dill that appeared useful in the data, but it missed something obvious to anyone standing in NotCo’s kitchen: whatever else milk may be, people do not expect it to be green. The failure made it obvious to everyone involved that—despite having access to large amounts of data—Giuseppe had a serious lack of context.

The green milk vividly illustrates the different nature of machine knowledge. Giuseppe excels at detecting potentially useful relationships among ingredients and molecular compounds. But it cannot taste the product, smell it, or understand everything people expect from a glass of milk. In contrast, chefs can recognize if a prototype is too grassy, too thin, too sweet, or simply wrong. They can appreciate color, aroma, mouthfeel, aftertaste, stability, and performance under heat. Much of this knowledge has been acquired through experience and is difficult to reduce to rules."