A food blogger's recipe or an AI generated customized recipe to suit your needs better
You are back home after a long day and you want to make something quick to eat. Ordering something online is always an option of course, but you want to cook something healthy. Even better with what is readily available at home.
If you own an iOS 18, you would have access to Artificial Intelligence (AI) that could serve as a recipe generator assistant. The Apple Intelligence Demo shows a user asking Siri for a dinner party meal plan with the ingredients available at home. AI returns a list of recipes with the available ingredients. While that sounds convenient and indicative of consumer preferences, there has been an ongoing debate about the relationship between AI and cooking. The response is not entirely on the positive side. Adding fuel to fire is the news report from Forbes last year that an AI generated recipe produced a recipe for “aromatic water mix” when a Twitter user asked for a recipe with water, bleach and ammonia. The recipe produced deadly chlorine gas.
Every new technology has downsides. Do they always mean that the technology must be swept under the rug?
Teens at the Young Writers’ Club took on the challenge of analyzing this matter and looking at the big picture. The subject was a tough one especially because none of them cooked on a regular basis. The need to figure out how to cook a complete meal given what is available at home is a problem they have never faced. Hence, the need to think really hard as potential users if this new way of using AI is promising or not.
Information provided to kickstart the discussion
The impact on food bloggers- food bloggers make a lot of effort to document their culinary experiences. Often times these bloggers make connections to culture and provide lesser known recipes and techniques. There is a personal touch to these blogs. An example- The Woks of Life is a food blog that two sisters started with their family. After an idea comes up, they test the recipe for 40 times and it needs to be approved by every member of the family before it gets published. The blog brings forth cultural experiences and stories behind the food recipe to make it more engaging.
AI takes ideas from across the web, combines them and churns out what it claims to be a suitable recipe.
Food bloggers too draw inspiration from available recipes, experiment with ingredients and techniques to create new recipes
The difference is that a human food blogger would have tasted the food for salt, spice, texture etc and gone back to making changes to make it better. The recipe would go through a number of iterations before it is published.
Agenda set for discussion
Considering that latest phones have AI recipe generators installed, do you think this feature will become popular? Would you use it? Initial thoughts…
Mistakes made by AI cannot be ignored
Could make it a lot easier to prepare a meal
AI has advanced quite a bit if it is able to create recipes of its own.
Would AI in this space replace traditional food bloggers?
Might make the ideas of food bloggers obsolete.
But they could benefit too. They could save time creating recipes of their own.
There is a risk of recipes sounding somewhat similar as in any case AI is combing through tons of information already available and creating a ‘new’ recipe.
Do you think that food bloggers could help bring a certain culinary experience to life which a machine generated recipe cannot? Think of reasons.
The difference is that a human food blogger would have tasted the food for salt, spice, texture etc and gone back to making changes to make it better. The recipe would go through a number of iterations before it is published.
Where as with AI: May not be a tested recipe. Follow at your own risk.
Would you as an individual pick a traditional food blogger's recipe over an AI generated recipe when you set out to cook something for yourself?
There is definitely a need to verify nature of ingredients and not blindly follow an AI generated recipe.
Wouldn’t mind eating food made using AI generated recipe if it tastes good. Even better if a chef could add a few tweaks to make it even more delicious.
Conclusion
The target clientele is likely to be a homemaker or anyone who needs to cook on their own. But for the potential dangers, the concept in itself is interesting. It saves time, energy and perhaps even money. However, the list of disadvantages is longer.
Errors with ingredients
Generation of dangerous recipes
There is no human involvement making the whole recipe generation process machine like.
If some ingredient for a food blogger recipe is not available at home, procuring it within a short span of time is possible thanks to the home delivery apps such Swiggy Instamart, Zepto, Blinkit & Big Basket in India.
Curious questions about this novelty
AI is taking the world by storm. Students are most familiar with the use of chatbots to help with information for their academics. They would have heard about the loss of jobs. But loss of jobs for culinary bloggers? That’s a first.
Will there be a different AI for people with a different taste?
Is it really necessary to have an AI like this. Are we wasting resources for its development?
In sum, the teens at the Young Writers’ Club questioned the utility and the need for AI recipe generator in the latest version of smartphones. The fact however remains that there is demand for such a feature. If not why would smart phone manufacturers such as Apple, invest in this feature? Only the future can tell…
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