Artificial intelligence is quietly disrupting the fragrance development process | Hacker News Reader

Artificial intelligence is quietly disrupting the fragrance development process

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94 pointsprostoalex50 comments

It's curious to me that whenever these kinds of stories emerge the arguments of "why don't we spend the time/money being expended on this frivolous activity on more useful problems" are nonexistent. Contrast this with stories involving higher order aspirations (like space exploration) and those comments are legion. It's like we are drawn to the mundane out of comfort and shirk the aspirational out of fear.

If you think that fashion and perfumery are “the mundane” you are sorely wrong. They are the most anthropologically interesting endeavor I can think of, except for maybe more formally studying remote tribes. Scents in particular is an extremely fascinating industry, marketing the invisible and crafting cultural narratives around the most primal and underrated sense we have.

To each our own. I don't think work in this area serves humanity one iota. But that's my opinion and I respect yours.

What exactly is your opinion, out of interest, like how does it work? Do all the miriads of people who buy fragrances or fragrant-induced products (not to mention all the workers of that industry) just spend their money and resources on something that makes them no benefit whatsoever because they are what, too stupid? Or like they don't understand what they like? Or can't form their own decisions? In what way do those numbers not speak of some amount of "serving" these people receive from the fragrance industry? Since they keep using it, keep pouring their resources into it?

Also where do you draw the line? How about video games? Do they really serve humanity after all? Porn? Christmas lights? All the work spent on designing and constructing beautiful buildings? Should all buildings just be efficient faceless boxes because it saves more resources?

>because they are what, too stupid?

Because they are inconsiderate of others who do not want to smell the fragrances.

Think of it like smoking. Annoying and offensive to people nearby. No need to hone this.

No.

Yes.

By this area do you mean fragrances? Or the application of AI in this specific example?

If the latter I'm inclined to agree with you, since there's already more fragrances out there than I could ever hope to sniff, and many of the ones I have sniffed smelled pretty amazing without AI.

If the former, I think it's a bit much to just dismiss fragrances as pointless so easily; people have been obsessed with taste and smell for thousands of years, and indeed it has shaped the course of history e.g. spice trade etc., so clearly fragrances are involved with a very basic and important human need.

>people have been obsessed with taste and smell for thousands of years, and indeed it has shaped the course of history e.g. spice trade etc., so clearly fragrances are involved with a very basic and important human need.

You can't assume that just because people are obsessed with something it is a basic need. One counterexample would be that thing where they implant wires in the right spot in your brain and you become obsessed with pressing the button to zap yourself.

Firstly you misquote me, secondly you cite a highly artifical and slightly bizarre example that if anything disproves what you are trying to prove, and thirdly I'm not really sure I see the point of quibbling with the fact that our sense of smell/taste is tightly bound with survival, which was kind of my overall point albeit poorly expressed perhaps.

>Firstly you misquote me

I cut and pasted that line out of the comment, how could it be a misquote? Perhaps the original comment was edited after I posted my comment?

No, you changed 'are involved with' to 'it is', which changes the meaning. And please don't accuse me of changing what I wrote.

AI could help with detecting people wearing them and singling those people out for fines and/or education on how wearing fragrances is extremely inconsiderate to others.

It all depends I suppose. The merest whiff of Cerutti 1881 takes me straight back to a particular girlfriend in the mid-90s.

You're not getting the meaning of the word "inconsiderate."

One of the most fascinating people I had the good fortune to cross paths with while living in the Bay Area was a women who worked as a _very_ high end scent consultant. She'd routinely fly across the world to figure out how the various areas of a new Four Seasons or some such should smell before it opened.

One of the more interesting engagements she told me about was to figure out the best smell to be used in olfactory warning systems for loud underground mining environments. If you're wearing so much PPE you cant hear anything, apparently pumping the smell of gag inducing rotting cabbage is the most sure fire way to ensure everyone in the mine knows to get out _now_.

>the most primal and underrated sense we have.

If only this sense could be elevated and respected at the level of, say, hearing.

Then just as with unwanted noise, perhaps cultural norms could shift such that people who inflict "pleasant" or "fascinating" fragrances on others who find them irksome would be discouraged from doing so the the extent that they do now.

It's still "just" a kind of art. It's not going to let us populate a new planet or harvest space minerals. Art is valuable but the point of the person you're responding to still stands.

Making one vial of perfume is art. Making millions needs some complicated chemical and logistic apparatus behind it.

And art does make technology evolve. History of art is constrained by the techniques and products available at the time. Painters have always chased elusive colors and chemists have strived to give them what they wanted for cheap prices.

The convenience of going to a modern paint shop and getting pretty much any color you want is a modern luxury.

Art would most definitely help us populate a new planet or harvest space materials. It paves the way, quite literally, in the imagination to even understand it might be possible and the implications of such.

Additionally, a society that has no meaningful manner of media, culture, or expression sounds exactly like the sort of stuff that art has been exploring for decades. It’s usually not portrayed as some sort of utilitarian utopia though...

Some people find artistic expression to be as important or more important than "useful problems" like space travel.

If you're using AI and consumer testing to determine every parameter of your product, which is then manufactured and sold to consumers with the goal of making money, you may have abandoned your claim on the category of "artistic expression." The parent comment by galacticaactual was comparing space travel with the manufacture of optimized luxury widgets, not with personal expression.

We tend to not question free spending, while we tend to try to keep our governments under strict control. You may disagree on the degrees we do those, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong here.

When I think those kinds of questions, I inevitably realize it's all emergent behavior. People do things locally in their own self-interests. If more people were employed in space exploration, there would be more ai applied to space exploration. But more people are involved in fragrances, so you get this.

Why isn't AI involved in automatic hand washing and toilet flushing, which has not reached state of the art. because people buy a new toilet maybe once a decade, even though the benefit to society in hygiene and water savings would be large.

Surprisingly public spending of billions of dollars is subject to more scrutiny than personal purchases of 100 milliliters of scented ethanol.

The ethanol is just there as the delivery medium, it evaporates very quickly leaving just the scent behind.

Or maybe space exploration is mundane to some. But a tantalizing scent excites nearly all.

I wonder how can you produce data to train ML models. Take some combo of chemicals and ask people to smell and rate it?

Last year I worked with a start-up called Scentronix, which makes customized perfumes. The company made a device which can quickly blend fragrances on the spot based on 200 most commonly used ingredients in the business. Apparently, you can make most of the available perfumes with these base ingredients. The recipes are a bunch of known well-received recipes, and it will also blend new random recipes (with certain constraints like don't add too much of an overwhelming base scent). They sample feedback from people and train a collaborative filtering classifier. It is a hard problem, and the data is very noisy, but we did start to get better-than-random results at some point. https://scentronix.com/

You could do something similar to how they trained a ML model to find antibiotics compounds: https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2820%2930.... First, train a deep learning model to learn a representation of molecules from their molecule structures. Then feed in the thousand or so known compounds that produce pleasant or unpleasant smells as training data with some score of "pleasantness". We can then use this model to quickly score millions of compounds and select candidates to test.

I love the explanation.

I guess a better way would be to monitor their brain activity. That being said I consider most of the perfumes polution.

The article so far just seems to be the usual AI wishful thinking from people who hope to profit from it and no disruption to speak of as yet.

Reminds me of AI generated music which usually sounds a lot like some kind of Frankenstein - sort of recognizable bits and bytes mashed together in barely acceptable composition.

I've been experimenting with using Google's midi generation to be as a starting point for phrases. It's not great but can be a useful starting point. Like radiology, it seems ai can be good enough to prepare work and then have it finished by a human expert. We don't need this stuff to be human, we just need it to complement our own skills and unlock productivity/creativity that we then refine with a human context/touch.

This is quite fascinating. There are a lot of fragrances out there released over the years. So there is a lot of data to create models.

Not my comment, but exactly my thoughts:

AI is a buzzword with no meaning behind it used by every idiot that runs a script on a big CSV file, so far outside of IT it can't be any less of a meme. I can already see them "analyzing" these "top 10 compliment beast" listicles and creating "sex in a bottle" and it's going to be Secretions Magnifiques II.

I struggle to think of any artificial "fragrance" that's anything other than an annoyance to me. I include perfumes, colognes, and various kinds of masking scents that are supposed to make other products smell better. If this "industry" is "disrupted," I doubt that I would know or care. (Words in quote marks indicate cynical bemusement and a lack of time to expound on them.)

A properly worn fragrance doesn't "mask" your scent, any more than jewellery doesn't mask your appearance.

Fragrances shouldn't be so strong as to be particularly noticeable or overpowering, it's supposed to be subtle. In the same way as jewellery, it should complement your appearance.

You wouldn't really particularly notice if someone wasn't wearing jewellery or cologne, and you definitely notice when it's garish and overpowering or tacky, but properly applied it's stunning (both jewellery and fragrance).

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