Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 2 - Port

My notes for today’s blog read as follows:

• Tawny vs ruby vs LBV
• Cheeky vimto?
• With what cheese?

Just thought I’d give you a peek behind the curtain of how these articles are constructed. Typically I’ll start with these notes and then write an introduction. Then expand out the notes into paragraphs, then go back in to the text editor and revise at the sentence level. 

This week I thought I’d just pop these notes into Google’s Bard “AI” content plagiariser and get it to write the thing for me.

I used the following prompt:

“Write a Finnginn style blog article with the title "Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 2 - Port" based on these notes: Tawny vs ruby vs LBV; Cheeky vimto?; With the Cheese?”

Bard seems to think that Finnginn is some kind of pirate and after some fairly laboured and dull descriptions of the three affordable port types finished with this paragraph.

“Cheeky Vimto? With the cheese?

Now, before you go pourin' Vimto in yer port (though I wouldn't put it past some o' ye!), remember, port is meant to be savoured. Take your time, swirl it in yer glass, and let the flavours dance on yer tongue. And as for the cheese? Well, that's a whole other story for another day. Just know that a good Stilton or a creamy Camembert can be the perfect partner for your port (though maybe not the Vimto).”

Large Language Models such as Bard are trained on billions of examples of text data, and produce outputs as correlated best guesses of likely word combinations that form grammatical sentences. 

A “Cheeky Vimto” you’ll remember is the classic combination of 275ml blue WKD alcopop and 50ml ruby port beloved of UK clubbers circa 2005. In a separate prompt, I asked Bard for a recipe for a Cheeky Vimto and it gave a passable one.

All this is weird because the actual blog I wrote up from my notes is as follows:

Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 2 - Port

I've written a handy poem to help you remember your different types of port. (I've excluded vintage port for reasons budgetary and literary). Here it is:

Finginn's guide to the affordable ports

Tawny’s brawny,

Ruby’s cheap, 

But FTW: LBV!

(“Cheeky Vimto?” - “Not for me.”)

-

As for the cheese I’ll be pairing with my Graham’s Late Bottled Vintage? Here’s my top 5 Xmas Tunes for 2023!

5: Christmas Wrapping: The Waitresses

4: Staple Singers: Who Took the Merry out of Christmas?

3: Boney M: Mary’s Boy Child

2: The Three Tenors: Adeste Fideles!

1: Dolly Parton: Hard Candy Christmas

What cheesy Xmas tracks will you be rockin' around the Xmas tree to after a sweet and mellow glass of port? Let us know in the comments or on the social media.

Photo by Stefan Grage on Unsplash