Am I redundant?
Will Artificial Intelligence make food writers superfluous? How would Charles Dickens review McDonald's? And a recipe that channels Jamie Oliver.
This year, via the Guild of Food Writers, I started mentoring a young, clever and enthusiastic guy who wants to earn a full-time living as a food writer. I get a lot of satisfaction from our Zoom sessions, and I’m happy he seems to find my random thoughts vaguely useful.
There is, however, always a little voice whispering in my ear, “Should you really be encouraging him? Why don’t you tell him how difficult it is to make a good crust from this gig?” I generally shoosh that little voice, but it’s been whispering a bit louder since a press release dropped into my In Box announcing the launch of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) recipe generator called Let’s Foodie.
This online tool prompts users to input a list of ingredients and the quantities they have available, their dietary requirements and any other specifics. Then it does some algorithmic number crunching stuff and churns out a recipe.
It's not the first recipe-generating platform, of course, but it claims to be pioneering the use of AI to create recipes rather than pulling already-written-ones from existing sources. In fact, it piggybacks on the hyper-hyped headline-grabbing application ChatGPT, developed by research company Open AI.
As you will know already, ChatGPT can communicate with a startling degree of sophistication, on any topic, in written English (or any language). Like how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR in the style of the bible. But to mock it as nothing more than a clever tech toy is a mistake, according to those who know about these things. And it’s made me wonder (as it has for everyone who gets paid to write stuff, I assume): will it make food writers redundant?
I decided to give ChatGPT a try. First, I asked it to write a recipe in the style of Jamie Oliver using stale bread and mouldy tomatoes. Here’s the response.
I’ve got to admit this shocked and impressed me. The recipe is simple but would definitely work, and the answer reflects an ‘understanding’ of the human response to rotten food. (Not sure it got Jamie’s voice right, though.)
The really impressive thing is that the answer/recipe can be refined, or corrections demanded. Here I want to make the dish without using an energy-hungry oven.
I also want more flavour and ‘Jamie’ is happy to oblige ..
I go on to ask for a lower calorie version of the dish, how to boost its Vitamin C content and instructions for how to mince the garlic. All the answers were detailed and accurate. This recipe won’t blow your mind gustatorily, but I can’t find much to fault. (Except that ChatGPT is a most excellent procrastination tool, and infinite hours can be wasted asking it to write things like a negative review of McDonalds in the style of Charles Dickens.)
I ask Lewis Crutch, founder of Let’s Foodie, whether I should hang up my apron and shut the laptop now. Is he elbowing me out of a job? “No, your job is safe for now,” he says. “AI is amazing but it’s not that creative. Although the AI we know now is often sold as being intelligent, it has to learn from existing sources.”
In other words, AI relies on the creativity of actual human food writers like me to construct the framework on which it builds its answers. “It cannot independently come up with recipes without any source material to learn from,” Crutch says. But if AI is capable of doing this now, in its infancy, for how long will my job be safe?
In functional terms , a major drawback of AI generated recipes is that they haven’t been tested, just cobbled together in cyberspace. “AI isn’t foolproof,” Crutch admits. “It might suggest unusual food combinations or cooking times as no AI recipe is going to have been tested by a human.” Which is great, of course, until the next technological leap.
I’m equal parts shocked, excited, depressed, confused and anxious about AI’s potential impact on my work. And to be honest, I’m not sure what to tell my mentee when next we Zoom. I doubt that food writers will ever be replaced completely by AI because the very best food writing draws deeply on the human experience: love, family, connections with others, nostalgia, childhood experiences, travel and so on.
But AI will take some of our work away, I’m sure of it. I might tell my mentee to give ChatGPT a try so he can see for himself what it can and can’t do. I’ll also suggest he ask it how to cook a giraffe in the dishwasher. He might be surprised by the reply.
What do you think about AI and its potential impact on your work? I’d love you to leave a comment below.
Fascinating, Sue - and - as someone who's a food writer - rather sobering!
I’m a little bit taken aback this very week with AI being offered on my business’s web platform. Crept up out of literally nowhere. Pah! I write beautiful product descriptions, I’m a poet in my spare time, there’s no way it could do as good a.....oh, wait. What the actual?????? I cautiously welcome it from the ‘free me from this drudgery’ angle - much like the Industrial Revolution etc etc but no, surely AI is not going to be able to mimic all the feels that one gets from the outpouring of human experience and emotion in written form. I hope.