Digital olfaction

15 July

There is an elephant in the room. Or should I say, there is a family of elephants in the olfactory studio.

They are powered by Artificial Intelligence, and they are doing very well on LinkedIn, where conversations about them have infiltrated all of our home feeds. Some perfumers are welcoming them, there’s a group who passionately detest them, and everyone else is pretending they aren’t there. Their industry compadres in venture capital land are absolutely frothing over them, and the cartel of oil houses are hiking up their pinstripe chinos to chase after them as quickly as possible.

Huge caveat to this entire blogpost: I am not an investigative journalist, I am just curious and love having opinions. Apart from Osmo, all I know of the companies and products mentioned in here is what I have read in some articles, seen on social media, or gleaned from people ranting about them on LinkedIn. There are also many other olfactory-AI products and models that I haven’t mentioned and don’t even know about.

So let’s discuss (briefly. I also don’t have the attention span for longform, unless it’s fiction or written like fiction. Anyhoo)…

Some of these perfume AI thingies (or OI, as they like to say at Osmo, which is catchy despite being technically incorrect in that context – you still need the A) are physical products powered by AI: from dinky little gadgets in-store (Kaorium – I’ve tried it, it’s cute and fun but didn’t stop me from just using my analogue nose) to whole points-of-sale stuck onto a big robot perfumer in a museum (see Every Human’s locations, plus the Xulei Fragrance Museum in Guangzhou, for example). Personally, I like these perfumer automatons. They’re gimmicky and fun and the complete opposite of what I do, which is make perfumes for humans and spaces and events and groups of people and products and situations; not according to what they already know and like, but what my little human brain can offer them with that knowledge. However, if anyone has figured out how to get a LLM to read the IFRA website CORRECTLY, I will install that chip into my brain.

Then there are the VC hotties. They’ve burst onto the scene with their vroom-vroom cars and pink sunglasses like the nepo babies of Hollywood (I have not seen a single nepo baby wearing pink sunglasses but if I were a nepo baby, I would. Luckily I have red heart-shaped ones). Mummy (venture capital funds) gave them loads of money and Daddy (the tech industry) told them they’re really onto something with this smell palaver. And it’s true. Sorry but it is!! The chips have fallen. People across the globe are getting very scent-obsessed and very AI-obsessed and HELLO. The natural intersection. Also, why can’t we have AI too? If you can use AI as an assistant or a toolset in other domains, why not in the perfume industry? ***OBVIOUSLY*** I don’t want [and have no intention of] giving over my creativity to the robot nepo babies, and I’m annoyed that they can vroom in and take away my potential job opportunities like real nepo babies, but I do think we could do with some useful tech tools. Unfortunately, the nepo babies don’t actually do anything useful, as yet (that I can see) for independent perfumers.

Things I would like perfume AI (or OI. Are we going with that?) to actually do:

1. Read the PDF-heavy and clunky IFRA website and live-update themselves to have a complete understanding of current regulations and usage limits for various IRA categories.
2. Sort out my compliance documentation for me.
3. Help me understanding shipping regulations for perfume products, globally. And how to get around them eeeehehehehehehehe
4. Update my educational materials with up-to-date standards and information.
5. Alert me when I’ve accidentally made a Schiff base?

Things I don’t want the sentient robot to do:

1. Invent perfumes on my behalf
2. Steal my job opportunities

Full disclosure: I had a chat with Juju Lane from Osmo and said all this to her. She was a delight to speak to and was very earnest in her assurance that Osmo is not out to steal jobs and flip the finger at independent perfumers. Turns out Osmo is actually doing some wonderful stuff around scent and medical care, making new molecules at a rate of knots, as well as building a lab and manufacturing facility that will have lower minimum order quantities than the big Chinese factories. Whether that MoQ is reachable for baby perfume brands I am unsure, and whether you can bypass the Osmo AI itself and just hire the manufacturing services, I am also unsure. But I do know that they do not want to be our enemy. The opposite, in fact. The communication hasn’t quite caught up yet. I hope, anyway.

Osmo’s overnight promotion has got the oil houses in a spin. Especially because they have their own nifty algorithmic software – primordial AI at this point – that they’ve used to jog the imaginations of their tired-of-fruity-florals perfumers for at least a decade. Givaudan has come up with a fun little thingamy-bob called Myromi™; IFF recently announced ScentChat™, a perfumery instant messenger that I guess won’t involve usernames such as HotGurlz69 (or will it?); and Symrise is [yelling at cloud] because they came up with this shit in 2019 with Phylira by Symrise.

Takasago, like the Tokyo Institute of Science, are doing their sciencey due diligence by studying and releasing papers first before they go and gallop into the fray. Takasago went and messed around with “silicon sampling” and at the Institute of Science Tokyo they developed a model called OGDiffusion (yes, the OG stands for Original Gangster). (No it doesn’t you noodle. It stands for Odor Generative). Either way, their sample sizes are teeny tiny and would get laughed at in the locker room so it’s really just a fun pilot study at this point – I’m sure they’ll go ahead and build them anyway.

Which leads me to my final comment on scent-AI. Which is that I don’t trust that there is genuine universality in their feeds and the sources of their knowledge pools. It’s all English-speaking, Western-hemisphere IP and therefore, once again, follows the same biases we already see in the perfume industry. So if you go and ask it for a “relaxing” fragrance you are going to get lavender over and over again until the cows come home. And if you ask it for a sweet dessert it is not going to give you redbean (☹) it is going to give you caramel. Etc. I suspect that China’s tech giants are just watching as everyone else figures this out and then they’ll go a build the biggest, nastiest, hairiest-chested scent-AI on the planet lol.

To the people that hate AI, fair enough. We were doing just fine without it, and it has come and started doing all the jobs we like doing, plus all the jobs we were crap at but made us feel accomplished, and none of the laundry. There are no guardrails in place for the effect it will have on our future, and the tech bros/companies just keep forcing it onto us recklessly and greedily. I get it and I agree. But I still use it (the free version).

Like all things, it is fine in moderation. It would be fine with legal parameters and an ENVIRONMENTAL PLAN to actually offset the horrific things it does to the planet. Sadly those things aren’t in place, we still don’t have IP rights as perfumers, and it all feels rather icky. Remember when AI was an idiot, and wrote the silly Harry Potter chapter, and the obituary for Brenda who was supposedly a bird? Those were the days.

Anyway, looking at the historical patterns of these things, it will negatively affect a generation or two, and then it will finally be given some discipline. We won’t be around for that, so whether you choose to use AI or not is a fair enough choice. At this point, AI can’t make formulations that are good enough to produce without humans (for example, Osmo has a handful of in-house perfumers, and look! Aurelien Guichard had a little experiment with AI himself: https://www.salle-privee.com/products/ai), and companies are still keen to use it more for DIY-scent design rather than in place of a dedicated professional - see Scented AI for an app you can get in your device.

In the meantime, see the screenshots of me ragebaiting the chatbot at Every Human only to have it make ME decide what goes in the fragrance…