Can you really trust AI to cook your dinner?
It's time to count the fingers in that pie.
You can ask ChatGPT to give you a recipe for chicken pot pie. But should you? As OpenAI continues to blur the line between research engine and search engine, it's only natural that people have started to try it out. Unfortunately, thanks to hallucinations, you're not always likely to get good results.
Do androids dream of electric beef?
You're making a curry. But you hate potatoes—and you love carrots. You know that it takes, give or take, 10 minutes to simmer potatoes but a touch longer to simmer carrots. So, you put the carrots in slightly earlier.
While you're undergoing this decision-making process, you're probably not even consciously thinking about it. Cooking is a science, but it's also intuitive.
ChatGPT, Gemini—they don't understand carrots. They don't understand their flavor profile or how long they take to cook. But they do understand (in some fashion) the words statistically likely to lead to "carrots."
So, when LLMs create a recipe, they can create something that looks very much like something that you might cook. You can trust that it is, statistically, a relevant recipe. But because these recipes are designed without an underlying understanding of cooking, they will be less and less accurate the more unique your recipe is.
How to get the most out of AI when cooking
A better use of AI is, perhaps, to ask AI to suggest recipes to you. Consider the difference between these two queries.
ChatGPT, make a recipe
ChatGPT, find a recipe
ChatGPT can be used to find things quite exceptionally. You could ask it to find you a keto chocolate cake recipe and, well, it would find you something that called itself that.
But, For the love of God, don't actually let it bake
A chocolate cake recipe is, probably, going to be fine. But the more obscure you get, the more likely you are to get something disastrous. Food is fairly easy to tweak. A cake without enough leavening will not rise. Baking is quite a lot of science to go along with its artistry. Even when using a real recipe, some baking tasks are prone to failure.
Do not try macaroons.
Want to learn more?
Check out recipes with ai for a quick overview of how AI works, what it does, and how you can avoid common pitfalls.