Remember the halcyon days before the peak of AI fever? Around 2017, they piqued an interesting curiosity. Because their work was so ridiculous that no one could take it seriously. Before the AI-generated content collapsed, BuzzFeed covered the work of Janelle Shane, a researcher who fed recipes into neural networks and recorded their bizarre output. This included abhorrent acts such as…
Here are my personal favorites that inspired the headline “Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake.”
material:
– 2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
– 1 cup dark brown sugar
-2 eggs
– 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
-2 tablespoons vegetable oil
as needed – 1/4 cup milk or other liquid (too hot will make the cake soft)
– 1 large chicken. Mix all ingredients and refrigerate for 30 minutes or overnight. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.-Hold the top and sides of the chicken with both hands and gently place it into the casserole, just as you would when making meatloaf. Bake for 40 minutes or until chicken is cooked through.
– Allow cake to cool completely before serving.
delicious!
As is often the case anyway, this application of AI has evolved since then. A few weeks ago, as I was scrolling, an image caught my eye. Something is…off.
I stopped and looked at it for a while. I was convinced that it was a little overdone when it came to textures and everything looked too saturated. Admittedly, I spent a little too much time looking at the AI-generated images, so it’s really possible this is all a nail-to-the-hammer kind of thing, but I’m not sure if I’ll click through to see the recipe. I tried it. And hey, was what I found in Facebook groups like “AI Recipes Should Stop” a complete revelation about its nature? Sure, but when I read the recipe itself… I felt a little depressed.
Orange Dreamsicle Salad 😋😋 Don’t Lose This
material:
1 box of orange jelly
1 box of instant vanilla pudding
1 cup boiling water
1/2 cup cold water
1 8oz bottle of Cool Whip
1 14 oz can mandarin oranges, drained
1 cup mini marshmallows
Instructions:
Combine orange jelly and boiling water in a large bowl.
Whisk until the jelly is dissolved.
Add cold water and chill in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes.
Gently mix in the vanilla pudding mix until smooth and chill for an additional 15-20 minutes, or until slightly thickened.
Mix Cool Whip, mandarin oranges, and marshmallows.
There are a few things I could tell you, but I’m far from a culinary expert. Adding cold water to hot jelly and then adding vanilla pudding mix seems pretty weird to me, but guess what? You might do that if you want to mix pudding and jelly. I scrolled down and found some comforting fake entries, which made me feel a little better.
I was relieved, at least in part. Thankfully, AI content still has some glaring flaws. I’m not stupid enough to think I can’t be fooled, but I was shocked at how far chocolate chicken chickpea cake has come. Sure, peppermint on nachos is incredible, but we now live in a world where an AI-generated jelly salad doesn’t immediately seem fake. That’s progress. And while the science is clearly not complete, there are recipes out there for AI to generate. They don’t make delicious food, can be deadly, and offer poison sandwiches, but that hasn’t stopped the mass adoption of AI recipe generators.
As with any AI-generated image, the question “why” arises. Why are we so desperate to build machines for things we can easily do ourselves? Recipes are already published in books and on the Internet. Do I really need to scroll through someone’s life story or article on something like pink sea salt before reading a shitty recipe? Yeah, probably! But it’s there and it’s free. Are we really that lazy that we can’t easily find recipes that are already out there? Is it really worth the gamble to think that software will generate them for you? At least with AI images, you can get an idea of the false opportunism. Even non-artists can quickly and easily create art. I know that here in America we chose a madman with a bug in his head and a love for dead animals, but I can certainly see the stupidity of letting an AI create recipes. It’s not difficult to Google recipes. They are all over the internet where you are reading this right now.
