AI 让"没人要的应用"变得前所未有地容易做出来

We’ve been inundated lately with AI-written press releases about AI-built tools and websites focused on beer and pubs. Who is asking for this?

When we say inundated, it’s probably been one per week for the past couple of months. And we’re not the only ones who’ve noticed this:

Do not in a million years send me a solicitious AI email asking me to endorse your beer guide website.Definitely do not do this if said website is riddled with wrong and/or outdated AI-generated info and covered in ugly AI-generated graphics.Have people lost all self-respect or what?

— Eoghan Walsh (@eoghanwalshbxl.bsky.social) 22 September 2026 at 22:32

In addition, we’ve also been noticing them cropping up in search results when we’re doing research.

For example, look at this history of the Beefeater pub-restaurant chain, which seems to have been scraped from multiple sources, rewritten with AI, and ‘vibe coded’ into an unsettlingly slick website with no named author.

One press release was about a pub crawl itinerary planner for travellers. The website is loaded with AI-generated images, AI-generated avatars and AI-generated text. The pitch is that it will help you make the most of your time in a foreign city, visiting only the best bars and taprooms in the most efficient way.

But, even taking AI out of the equation, who wants this service? Isn’t planning your trip half the fun? Or not planning it, for that matter – wandering about and seeing what looks interesting, or asking locals for advice when you’re on the ground.

Even if we did want to use AI for this, why would we go through this third-party mediator rather than just entering our query into ChatGPT or Google Gemini ourselves?

Another was a website that attempts to identify the origins of various ‘world lager’ brands, exposing which are authentic and which are actually brewed in the UK. This is in line with CAMRA’s recent campaign on the same theme and some people might think, actually, yes, this is interesting and worthwhile.

But… why does it need to be a single-serving dedicated website? Why does it need to be a website at all? Why does it need to be interactive?

It’s not doing anything, in our view, that couldn’t be done just as well, if not better, as a table in a single blog post on a website that already exists. And that’s before we even get into the question of whether the information on the website is correct.

What need is being met?

Outside beer, in our day jobs, we both spend a lot of time thinking about how products and services are designed and delivered. One key principle is that you start by putting a lot of effort into researching and identifying something people need, or at least want; and then you build it.

But most of these AI-generated websites and apps seem to start from the other end: think of something you can easily make with AI to boost your limited coding and writing skills; then see if anyone is interested.

AI makes this feasible because there’s so little effort involved in making something that you might as well take the ‘throw enough mud and some of it will stick’ approach.

Except – except! – you’re then creating a bloody big tidal wave of mud for everyone else to wade through on your behalf.

A while ago, we wrote about a service we thought might meet an actual user need, which is an app that prompts a publican to provide up-to-date information on their hours and offer, and automatically updates the pub website.

This highlights the main problem with so many AI-enabled hobby projects: presentation and interface design is the easy bit; it’s building or getting access to good quality underlying data that’s the challenge.

Nobody wants beer apps

Untappd isn’t a brilliantly designed app but it is built on a pretty comprehensive database of pubs, bars, taprooms, breweries and beers worldwide, which consumers can interrogate with relative ease. That’s where its value lies.

Even so, Untappd remains a niche app for a particular subset of completist nerds, which underlines something else important: there simply isn’t a huge demand for beer-related services, full stop.

When we were selling copies of Brew Britannia at a food event about a decade ago we had one person after another tell us that “I like drinking beer but I don’t want to read about it!” Frustrating as it was at the time, it was a lightbulb moment for us, and helped us understand the limits on the market for our work.

To succeed, these AI-generated tools and publications need to get over:

• that general lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of beer
• apathy towards AI from the people who are geeky about beer
• competition from existing generalist AI services

A final footnote

Our policy for a while has been to ignore PR emails that aren’t addressed to us personally and which are obviously part of mass mailing campaigns. We’re now going to start ignoring emails which have obviously been written with AI.

If you couldn’t be bothered to write something yourself and, instead, expect us to do the work of wading through several hundred words of smarmy, automated waffle, we can’t be bothered to engage beyond hitting the ‘Send to trash’ button in our email client.