Why recipe writers don’t need to worry about artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is touted as a way to make things better and faster than humans can by harnessing the power of computers that process innumerable equations in the blink of an eye. It’s been put to use in the fields of engineering, medicine, finance, and more. There are plenty of people worried that AI will put them out of a job, but recipe developers comprise one demographic that needn’t be concerned. It turns out that AI is terrible at creating recipes.

Janelle Shane, who writes for the blog AI Weirdness, devised an experiment in which she asked people to collect examples of the worst, the weirdest, the most gelatinous recipes that vintage American cooking has to offer, then she trained a neural net to imitate them. If you’ve ever read any of the gelatin-based recipes from the 1950s and 60s, you know they were already a bit wacky. Add in a computer that really doesn’t know what ingredients go together and it gets really weird really fast.

Most of the recipes the neural net developed were strange, to say the least. Titles like ‘Creamy biscuits filled with allergy zombies’ and ‘Magnitude collar’ are a few of the bizarre recipes concocted with this technology. The instructions and ingredients were no better than the titles – it seems the neural net didn’t quite understand how to prepare gelatin (it wanted to bake almost everything), and it apparently liked eel quite a bit. Head over to AI Weirdness to read more and get a chuckle