AI Can Cook!
Revolutionizing the Culinary World with Artificial Intelligence

We have all read and heard about how artificial intelligence is going to take over the world, result in the mass job reductions, and possibly lead to our demise.  Is any of this true?  In most statements you can find some truth and while generative AI will have an impact on humanity, it will not have quite the impact everyone is up in arms about.  At the end of the day, generative AI is only as smart as the cumulative information it has consumed.  And when I say smart, it does not have a “thinking” intelligence.  It is not sentient.  It is merely a giant search engine that can combine answers into a solution based on your input.   It is easy to apply human behavior to tools such as ChatGPT but in the end they are no more human than your pet, and even less.  Given this, what can you do with generative AI?  The answer is, quite a bit.  It is an extraordinary technology that will improve many aspects of our lives.  Read on to find out what I did.

I love to cook, and it is something I have been doing since I was a teenager.  I build technology solutions by day but cook by night.  Building software, solutions, and processes in the “real world” takes time.  A lot of it.  When you cook, you know the result in a matter of hours or even minutes.  You obtain real-time feedback from the consumers.  They do not ignore your surveys.  You know immediately if it was good or bad and what you can do to improve it.  Did it have too much salt?  Did it have too much acid?  Was it burnt?  In the IT world you may not know for months or even years.  And even then, you may only get a small portion of the overall feedback. 

I combined my expertise and experience with both technology and with cooking and applied generative AI to the art of cooking.  What if I could ask artificial intelligence to create fifty dishes from cuisines across the globe, write out their recipes, write an overview of the recipes, and mix in a fantastical story of explorers set across the globe who invented the dishes?  No cookbook is complete without photos of either the food or the people involved so I had to include imagery generated by AI as well.  And to put the icing on the cake, the book had to be digital only!

I set off on my journey to write a cookbook generated by AI with pictures generated by AI and published digitally for all to enjoy.  After some quick research on how to publish an eBook, I downloaded Amazon’s Kindle Create program, opened Microsoft Word, and browsed the Internet to Open-AI’s ChatGPT chat bot and DALL·E image generator.  I asked it to generate fifty recipes.  I asked it to generate fifty descriptions of the recipes.  I asked it to generate art that matched the scenarios.  And finally, I asked it to generate a story for each recipe, covering how explorers had come to invent the recipe. 

The result was questionable in many cases, with the system telling me it had to tell the truth when I asked for a fantastical story.  And sometimes it would give me answers that were not quite “right.”  The images generated ran the gamut of being irrelevant, weird, or just plain ugly.  In some cases, the art was quite humorous and made it into the eBook.  Once I had the bulk of the content, I went about the task of bridging items together and cleaning everything up.  The stories did not match very well in some cases and the book required a lot of editing to create a comprehensive cookbook with a story.

I edited the book, prepared it, and loaded it into Kindle Create.  From there I saved the Kindle File and created a publication on Amazon.  From there it was a simple task of adding the table of contents, an introduction, an epilogue, choosing a format, adding a book cover, choosing the financial arrangement (price) and hitting the publish button.  I waited a couple of hours and boom; it was online and ready for purchase! 

It took me two days to complete the process from start to finish.  I’ve written books before and they took me nine months or more to complete.  Wow.  Simply amazing.  Generative AI showed me it can be used to create recipes and write fiction.  It allowed me to write the book in a mind-blowingly short amount of time.  It did not write the book though.  It helped me write the book.  Just as I am using Microsoft Word to help me write this story, I used generative AI to help me write the book.  It is a very powerful tool but in the end is still just a tool.

My experiment raises many interesting questions and possibilities.  I was able to make minor adjustments to recipe descriptions and it generated the appropriate recipe perfectly.  I started with a bruschetta recipe with burrata.  I then changed it to add prosciutto.  Without hesitation it made the appropriate changes to the recipe, and I ended up with a bruschetta with burrata and prosciutto recipe.  I can imagine using generative AI to improve my old recipes.  I could ask it to take my secret BBQ sauce and add mango to it (easy).  Or have it write a mashup of my BBQ recipe, plus a Thai curry, with a recipe as the result that is usable (difficult).  Imagine how chefs can use generative AI to improve dishes or create brand new ones.  Give it a list of ingredients, choose the style of cooking, and generate a recipe you can cook to. 

Just as I used AI to create various cooking recipes, you can use the same techniques to generate music, or fictional stories, or blogs, or anything else in the realm of human creativity.  It will not replace humans that do anything other than basic tasks, but it will enable humanity to be even more productive, efficient, and creative if used properly.  The genie is out of the bottle, and instead of trying to stifle it, I suggest you use it in any way you can to improve your life.

For now, I am going to use generative AI to try out some other ideas and to pursue possibilities with cooking.  Hopefully it will not start writing its own code, become my overlord, and stop my pursuits?