Japanese bakery presents AI-crafted 'love bread'

Five AI-generated love breads offered by Kimuraya. Photo courtesy of NEC

The flavors of the new products under the name Ren AI Pan, or "AI romance bread," were created by AI using 15 hours of footage from a Japanese reality dating show and over 35,000 songs featuring references to fruit and sweets in their lyrics. NEC’s employed artificial intelligence used the data to identify the five key emotions of love: fateful encounter, first date, jealousy, heartbreak, and mutual love, CNN reported.

NEC used two AI technologies: "NEC Enhanced Speech" for converting speech to text, and "NEC Data Enrichment" for generating emotion scores from text. Using this data, AI selected ingredients symbolizing love emotions, collaborating with Kimuraya to create a variety of flavored breads.

According to NextShark, the flavors include cotton candy for "fateful encounter," citrus for the "first date," a blend of purple sweet potatoes, truffle oil, and raisins symbolizing "jealousy," apple cider and grapes for "heartbreak," and honey, peach, and dragon fruit for evoking the essence of "mutual love."

Despite AI's pivotal role in ingredient selection, human input remains essential in making the final product, particularly in ensuring visual appeal.

Yuki Kitazawa, a developer at Kimuraya bakery, told CNN: "The selection of ingredients was done by AI, but our role was to make them into bread. We paid attention to the colors used to express romantic emotions visually and aimed for a vibrant and pop appearance for Love Bread."

Since early February, these breads have been available for purchase in Japan's Kanto area and Kimuraya Bakery's online store.

A Kimuraya manager told the Japan News: "We really made this bread to encourage romance among young people. We believe it will be an effective way of tying you to someone you love."