Clearly we are pretty close to another revolution with artificial intelligent, in particular in the creation of media, from images, videos, code and natural language, even though we are still a bit far from creating true intelligence, these steps alone are demonstrating a huge array of options and things you can do, from solving problems to creating art.
However not all is fun and games, there are some not so positive aspects and one of those is creating cooking recipes with AI, I’ve seen several new sites and mobile apps popping up, offering millions of recipes and AI generated recipes and generating culinary recipes talking with an AI bot, AI generated cook books, it goes on and on, and here i find several different problems.
First, these AI don’t create something from nothing, they don’t work in vacuum, they have huge databases scrapped online and draw from these logical assumptions to create a recipe, it has to have ingredients, it has to have instructions, we are dealing with food and not paint, simple? Well not really, a recipe is more than just combining ingredients, to create a real recipe you need 3 concepts, you need experience, you need imagination and you need experimentation, without all of these you cant create a good new recipe and unfortunately AI lacks all of these.
Second, where is the AI getting all this information from? Have you seen the internet, have you seen the recipe landscape, its not pretty, with social networks rewriting recipes always rehashing the same things, with tiktoks and viral content creating random cooking ideas that i wouldn’t even call a recipe, from huge databases of barely tried recipes, these are a big part of the landscape, low quality, badly written recipes, so anyone trying to create a recipe with that as the basis will… with no doubt have a hard time creating anything good.
Third, this type of technology has a tendency to transform, to create new things from old things, in part to avoid copyright claims, in part because that’s what you want, if you want it to just tell you a recipe, you can search yourself, you want it to create something new, so how is it going to create? Is it going to change just small amounts of the ingredients to the point it makes no sense or just add new ingredients or rephrasing instructions, something like pastry is all about precision, in measurements and instructions, how is it going to mimic that? It won’t, it will just give you something that will seem and sound like a recipe.
Forth, a recipe is only good if you test it, before cooking a recipe its just a blueprint, so an AI is not going to cook it and even if it did, it cant try it and tell if its good or not, so any new recipe it gives you at best is a well written untested recipe, and for someone like me that has time to test it, it might be fun, but for 99% of you that just want a good recipe, the AI wont be of any help.
I think artificial intelligence is a good thing, and it might help a lot in creating new ideas, helping you write better, giving you some common knowledge and tips and even the occasional interesting recipe, but for cooking and recipes that only has value if someone like me (a human) filters it and tries it out for you and tells you if its a good idea or not, so next time you see someone offering you AI recipes, take it with a big grain of salt!
Hope you enjoyed my rant and have a awesome day! Until next time!
