Have you ever looked at a pink candy wrapper and thought, That’s going to taste sweet or seen a sharp-edged chocolate bar and felt it might taste bitter?
As quirky as this might sound, our brains often blur the lines between senses, merging colors, shapes, and even sounds with tastes.
Now, artificial intelligence is doing something eerily similar—using human-like sensory associations to “taste” colors and shapes.
This unexpected ability of AI has researchers and tech enthusiasts alike buzzing about what it means for the future of design, marketing, and even art.
How Does AI “Taste” Colors and Shapes?
The phenomenon of linking sensory cues is nothing new for humans. It’s called cross-modal correspondence—a natural blending of sensory experiences.
For example, studies have shown that red and pink hues are associated with sweetness, yellow with sourness, and black with bitterness.
Similarly, rounded shapes tend to be linked with sweetness, while jagged shapes evoke sour or bitter sensations. These subconscious associations influence everything from how we choose food packaging to how we perceive flavors.
Researchers decided to see if generative AI systems like ChatGPT could replicate these associations.
Using prompts like, “Which color best corresponds to a sweet taste?” and “What shape do you associate with sour flavors?” researchers found that AI mirrored human responses.
Pink was linked with sweetness, green with sourness, and black with bitterness. AI even connected round shapes to sweetness and sharp shapes to bitterness, just like humans often do.
What’s fascinating is that these AI outputs aren’t just random. They reflect patterns in the data AI models are trained on data steeped in human preferences, cultural cues, and centuries of sensory associations.
Why Does This Matter?
The implications go far beyond quirky party tricks. AI’s ability to mimic these associations could revolutionize industries like marketing, product design, and even entertainment.
Imagine a candy company designing packaging that not only looks sweet but feels sweet based on its shape and color or music tailored to complement the flavors of a meal, creating an immersive dining experience.
Carlos Velasco, a sensory marketing researcher, believes AI could become a key tool for discovering new sensory connections that humans haven’t yet explored.
“You could potentially use AI to discover the perfect correspondences to whichever dimensions you’re interested in,” he says. This could mean new ways of presenting food, drinks, and other products that feel intuitively satisfying.
As cool as this all sounds, AI isn’t perfect. It can “hallucinate,” or produce misleading results.
Unlike humans, AI lacks the emotional nuances that make sensory experiences so rich.
While it might suggest pink as a sweet color, it won’t appreciate the nostalgic warmth of a pink bubblegum wrapper on a summer afternoon.
That’s why experts see AI as a collaborator, not a replacement. It offers ideas and patterns but needs human creativity to make those ideas resonate. “It’s inspiration, rather than a definite solution,” Velasco points out.
So, Can AI Pick Your Christmas Playlist?
In a fun twist, researchers even asked AI to match music to wine flavors. For a glass of mulled wine, ChatGPT recommended Carol of the Bells for its layered melodies or Ella Fitzgerald’s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas for its warm, jazzy tones.
Whether your guests agree with AI’s choices is another story, but it’s a charming example of how technology is blending senses in creative ways.
AI’s ability to “taste” colors and shapes opens the door to exciting possibilities, but it also raises a curious question: How far can we trust machines to understand something as deeply human as sensory experience?
Is this a fun tool for creativity, or are we inching toward AIs that perceive the world as we do?
Source: BBC
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