Are recipes made by AI difficult to eat?

“We asked[popular AI chatbot]ChatGPT to create the perfect pizza recipe for Dubai,” said Spartak Arutyunyan, head of menu development for the Dubai branch of restaurant and delivery chain Dodo Pizza.

“And so the recipe was born. We launched it and it actually became a big hit and is still on the menu today.”

With 90 percent of Dubai’s population of 3 million people being immigrants, “we have a huge diversity of cultures here,” Arutyunyan said: “Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Arabs, Europeans.”

He asked ChatGPT to come up with a pizza that represented that fusion of cultures, and the answer was a pizza topped with Arab shawarma chicken, Indian grilled paneer cheese, Middle Eastern za’atar herbs, and tahini sauce.

And Dodo Pizza diners apparently never tire of it: “As a chef, I would never mix these ingredients on a pizza, but still, the flavor combination was surprisingly good,” Arutyunyan says.

But other AI-inspired pizzas, such as strawberry and pasta and blueberry and breakfast cereal, did not make the menu.

Further afield in the US, a similar AI experiment was conducted at Velvet Taco in Dallas, where Venetia Willis is head chef.

She was “really intrigued” by AI, so she asked ChatGPT to come up with one of her tacos of the week.

“They told me to use eight ingredients, but I could only choose one tortilla and one protein,” Willis said of the prompt.

The results of some recipes were not very appetizing.

“There were some unusual combinations and I wasn’t sure whether red curry, coconut tofu and pineapple would taste good together,” Willis says.

But she created three recipes that looked more promising, and eventually decided to sell her shrimp and steak tacos to the public, selling 22,000 of them in one week.

“I think AI is a great tool to reignite the brain when you’re feeling a bit creative. It’s like, ‘This combination might work, let’s try it.’ It might suggest things that I wouldn’t have thought of.”

But Willis added: “We don’t want to rely entirely on AI. We need the human element to validate our recipes.”

But not everyone in the food industry likes the idea of ​​AI: London-based cocktail creator Julien de Ferral says he steers clear of AI because it’s “so counterintuitive” and lacks common sense in its choices.

AI chatbots “are not magic,” cautions Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, who says they learn from what they read online.

“If you can get ChatGPT to spit out something that resembles a recipe, it’s because the recipes are out there on the internet.”

He added that AI could also steal recipes from someone’s cooking blog, reducing readership and their ability to make a living from subscription fees and advertising revenue.

But Professor Bender acknowledges that more sophisticated AI could help create recipes in future.

She said that an AI could be instructed to “categorize ingredients as sweet, sour, etc.,” then scour the internet for ingredients that are known to taste good together, allowing it to come up with an infinite number of detailed recipes. “But to reap such benefits, we need to clearly define the research topic (for the AI),” she added.

Still, British supermarket chain Waitrose is using AI to spot trending food trends on social media, which currently include “smashburgers” (crispy burgers made by smashing minced meat in a super-hot frying pan) and “Crookies” (croissants filled with cookie dough and chocolate chips).

“We saw Smashburger trending on social media,” says Lizzy Heywood, innovation manager at Waitrose, “and now there are three or four dedicated Smashburger restaurants opening in the UK at the same time as our own Smashburger launches.”

When it came to scammers, she said, the AI ​​detected that mentions of scammers were “up 80 to 90 percent from last year on social media” and was able to pilot it in stores within three months.

In Singapore, Italian expatriate Stefano Cantu has developed an AI-powered app that can suggest recipes based on ingredients in your fridge and cupboards, which he calls “ChefGPT” after the ChatGPT-powered app.

“I’m Italian, so of course I cook,” said Cantu, who works for a software company, and said he came up with the idea “over the weekend” after asking ChatGPT for recipe tips.

The app also features drop-down menus and toggles that allow users to specify what tools they have in their kitchen, whether they’re in a rush or aren’t good at cooking, etc., and the AI ​​will then suggest recipes and photos of the dishes.

Cantu says he got 30,000 users within a week and a half of launching last year, but then he got a “pretty big bill” from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

He continues to pay regular fees to OpenAI for the use of its AI, which Cantu said is standard practice for startups like his when building apps on other companies’ technology.

He added that the company continues to try to find “the right balance between advertising and subscriptions, and the right usage level to offer to free users,” and that it is also looking at “how to monetize free users’ data without selling it.”

Back in Dubai, Spartak Arutyunyan of Dodo Pizza said AI should be seen as something fun to use, rather than something that will underpin an entire menu.

But Dodo Pizza is now allowing Dubai customers who order through its app to use AI to invent their own unusual pizza toppings, and the company says it aims to expand the AI ​​feature to its other branches around the world.