Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI Late last year, Sam Altman, the optimistic CEO of chatbot manufacturer OpenAI, predicted artificial general intelligence would be with us in five years, give or take. But as fans of William Gibson will know, the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed, and Amazon has already given us a glimpse of what is in …
Speak for yourself. I have "The Garlic cookbook without garlic" generating right now. The introduction just says "feel free to add garlic". After that I'm going to do the sequel "The Chilli cookbook without chillies". Then to complete the trilogy I'm doing "The Cheese cookbook without cheese" though I'm not going to fully utilise AI for that just to spice thing up and add some personal favourites such as Toast and one I like to call Macaroni.
Then to complete the trilogy I'm doing "The Cheese cookbook without cheese" though I'm not going to fully utilise AI for that just to spice thing up and add some personal favourites such as Toast and one I like to call Macaroni.
I have a friend who used to have a cheese problem. She's now decided she's lactose intolerant and can only eat vegan cheese which is "shite".
I did point out she can't possibly be lactose intolerant, because she isn't middle class, but that fell on deaf ears.
Consider this...
Wouldn't The Chimp[AI] hit a cognitive wall?
Aw Come'on ... I'm sure the most likely explanation for Louise's missing right shoulder and mismatched earrings is that "Like many amateur photographers, [she does] occasionally experiment with editing". Plus, as is well known, "moths" are light eaters that enjoy neither beef nor garlic ... hence the discounted number of recipes, and ingredients. Her one-shoulder bandit crokpuff recipes will surely cure the obesity epidemic ... +1000!
I saw it mentioned somewhere, possibly this very august publication, that some tests with an AI creating recipes came up with food using outright dangerous and poisonous ingredients.
It'll be interesting to see the lawsuits if/when someone cooks up something that kills them or makes them ill and just who the defendants are.
Why ?
She writes recipies about garlic chicken containing no garlic.
Sorry, that's bullshit. I'm not going to excuse my language. Either you pony up a recipe with garlic, or you invent a fancy title about how your chicken tastes like it has garlic but doesn't.
I'm French. You say the recipe is about garlic chicken, you damn well better have garlic in your recipe.
Hmmm, me says your filthy mouse could use an introduction to the language of Coq!
Statistically I expect half the chicks to grow up into cockerels. So historically most capons and chickens were juvenile cocks. You only need one to increase the flock. See also the reason for veal, calf, lamb. The eggs and milk are desirable. Loads of cocks, rams and bulls are undesirable.
Shhhh ... hush-hush ... Alright now, I'll explain the joke (quietly): "The name Unics (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, pronounced as "eunuchs"), a pun on Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computer Services), was initially suggested for the project in 1970" (source). La-la-la-la-la ...
Nowadays: yes. The breeds focused on high egg yield do not produce enough meat to be viable.
There's a farm close by, they do raise the cockerels and then butcher them for meat. But they keep one of the older breeds where this still works. I have a strong dislike for the taste of chicken (yes, in contrast to the "chicken" you buy at the supermarket, which tastes of nothing, chicken has a flavour - one that I cannot stand), but the sausages are quite ok.
Last time I made I made Coq au Vin it definitely had coq in it. A friend finally got sick and tired of listening to his roosters dueling for the right to signal the crack of dawn. How he managed to put up with it for a couple years is beyond me ... But the four of them made a nice large pot of stew.
Rabbit pie (feeds 15)
First, breed your rabbits.
There's a recent Nature article on python farming as an efficient(*) source of food. 101 Python recipes could be a best seller, capturing two markets.
(*) Being cold blooded(**) they convert food to meat far better than mammals and lose little weight when temporarily starved.
(**) Pedants: don't start.
First, the limiting AI authors to 3 books a day does help the situation to a limited extent; there were some publishers like 4, 5 years ago that had 1000+ books; they'd have ones that the description openly admitted was just a book with like the digits of pi, or randomly generated digits, or whatever; I'm PRETTY sure the plan was to firehose out enough books they'd have books listed on almost anybody's search and they hoped someone would accidentally hit "buy it now"? Nevertheless it would have made finding real books on Amazon completely impossible if they hadn't imposed SOME limit.
What would be interesting was if the AI somehow "knew" what flavors various ingredients imparted (for example, a garlic chicken with no garlic, but the right combination of other spices to give it a garlicky flavor), or if somehow an AI could be trained for deliciousness and generate the optimally delicious recipes based on a set of ingredients. I imagine neither was the case here though. I wonder if the recipes are (for the most part) at least reasonably tasty or if it's just word salad that probably ends up being edible?
I found a recipe on t'interwebs about 10 years ago (so probably predated AI chefbots). It took several attempts to work out the correct sequence for the method including all the "while this then that" sections that didn't allow for task times. It demonstrated that there's more to writing a successful recipe than bunging together a list of ingredients and a list of instructions, so it'll probably be a while before AI recipes will be worth buying.
Not sure there are options for garlic ... but for grilled chicken on the other hand mealworm larvae can easily do the trick. One needs care however to add the garlic at the end only as allicin is a natural insect repellent that the bugs might flee if still conscious during execution.
"if somehow an AI could be trained for deliciousness and generate the optimally delicious recipes based on a set of ingredients."
That's going to be one of the harder things to automate. There's a lot of subjectiveness with whether a given collection of ingredients are delicious or noxious, and some people will fall into either group. A lot of successful recipes use trial and error. For example, I decided to make a certain dish and just improvised a recipe. The result was...edible, and it didn't taste terrible, but it was clearly not going to win any awards. Still, I could see that there was promise in it, so I started to adjust the amounts of some ingredients and some times. I wasn't going back to the drawing board, I wasn't putting in completely different things, just trying what would happen if I used different proportions and more heat. I think it helped. I might serve it to you and get a negative response though, so all I've proven so far is that I like what I eventually came up with.
The AI can't do any of that. It can probably suggest a possible recipe, but perfecting it will require some people who can explain what they like and don't like, and if it's supposed to appeal to a large group, you need a lot of them.
> Look around. This publication itself seems to be heavily reliant on generated images for its articles these days
Question is, how much are they making of you with these images?
For that matter, how much more/less useful are they than all the stock photos they would otherwise use? Are you really going to reading or ignoring any article based upon the image?
Are they even claiming, directly or indirectly, that those images are or are not generated by AI?
I had a similar experience recently, buying a book of cocktail recipes from amazon that was very clearly AI generated. Half of the recipes made no sense, ingredients listed that were never used in the instructions, the same recipe three times in a row under completely different names. When I went back to look I realised how fake all the reviews sounded now, praise for sections that weren't in the book, comments about the full colour photographs of the finished cocktails when there were no pictures at all in the purely monochrome book.
I just don't trust amazon any more, they've gone from selling useful products to just being a dumping ground for chinese dropshipping sites, you can't trust anything they sell to be usable.
> Wasn't there something a while back about returned Kindle books costing authors money because of some sort of data transfer fee?
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1107109243/amazon-kindle-ebook-return-policy
"Those suggesting the read-and-return practice think they're "sticking it to Amazon," but in reality are only harming the authors,...."
That article says authors may be paid before returns come in. I _do_ recall authors being made to pay the cellphone ("Whispernet") costs but that delivery may have faded with the death of 2G? My Kindles do WiFi not celldata.
Next toad in the hole without toad, spotted dick without the... spots?
LLM taking on natural language frequently comes a cropper and I suspect with quality food writing which is more literature than just a collection of recipes, will often crash out completely.
Modern human writers are often left floundering trying to reconstruct recipes not much more than century old.
Real classics of culinary literature generally only dedicate a small part to the actual recipes. Understanding what the recipe is attempting to achieve with the ingredients and how the procedure might achieve that, is the interesting part - otherwise its little more than a boring shopping list. The provenance of the recipe - when and where it was collected - is also of interest not just to the social historian.
Anyway another piece of civililization being shat on.
I don't understand why anyone would buy a cookbook from amazon etc when second hand book stores and charity shops have shelves of them at throw-away prices and public libraries generally a large sections too. While there is fashion in food trying some of the recipes from the 50s and 60s is interesting and in a time of increasing austerity might again become fashionable. Offal dishes might make a welcome return.
To be fair there's only really a couple of cookbooks per cuisine that are worth it, then a few more decent ones with many of the same recipes made more accessible, and then a zillion repeating the same.
For example, Larousse Gastonomique and your choice of an Escoffier will cover pretty much everything classical French and much Northern European, but will assume you already know how to actually cook, and what specific terms mean. There also built and costed like textbooks. Delia Smith will cover much of the same ground, but hold your hand while doing so, and be more reasonable price.
Most other cookbooks are, broadly, junk. Certainly compared to cooking forums and discussion groups.
There's a few where it's mostly junk, but there's a few gems. The Fat Duck is one of those, where there's some nice detailled stuff on setting agar and xanthium for plating sauces, a proper OCD detailing of making the perfect chips (which should be published by itself) and a bunch of BS :D
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