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Food and Generative AI

engineering.hellofresh.com

21–30 of 100 posts

Re: Food and Generative AI

#21
post #7

I feel like generating recipe ideas/titles is the easy part, and advanced AI techniques are not necessary. Even the article notes that there is not really any difference between 1 round of training and 40 rounds of training with their model. Actually generating a recipe is obviously much harder, and should be effectively impossible unless you include a humanoid robot that can cook and taste. I think the best you coul…

I get all of my recipes from GPT-4 these days. Granted, most of them are just regurgitating a common recipe, but I find that it's able to tweak recipes appropriately if I say "I'm out of X, can I use Y or Z instead?" - I've never actually had a bad recipe come of it.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not who you're replying to, but have experienced the same sadness when using meal kits. Why? - This company and its supply chain went to the trouble of packaging a single serving of mayonnaise for me to personally discard as my token contribution to waste. Sure, an extra mayo packet won't make a difference, but simply not caring feels bad, you know? - I have a jar of mayo in the fridge. I didn't even need this. -…

Would it be better if there used biodegradable plastics?

Yes, obviously.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#24
post #7

I feel like generating recipe ideas/titles is the easy part, and advanced AI techniques are not necessary. Even the article notes that there is not really any difference between 1 round of training and 40 rounds of training with their model. Actually generating a recipe is obviously much harder, and should be effectively impossible unless you include a humanoid robot that can cook and taste. I think the best you coul…

I get all of my recipes from GPT-4 these days. Granted, most of them are just regurgitating a common recipe, but I find that it's able to tweak recipes appropriately if I say "I'm out of X, can I use Y or Z instead?" - I've never actually had a bad recipe come of it.

post a picture of your dinner

Re: Food and Generative AI

#25

Curious to hear people's thoughts on AI applications in the food space.

I think something like the recipe generator that suggested mixing dangerous chemicals into cocktails is going to be a problem for any AI application in this space: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-po...

It’s important to caveat here the language model was prompted into the suggestions explicitly, it’s not that it spontaneously suggested dangerous recipes.

I’d not also that it’s getting harder to do that with current ChatGPT (this article uses GPT3.5), and I suspect “alignment” research in the 5 years time frame will make these sorts of things pretty hard to trick the models into doing.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#26
I like the idea of generating recipes with AI. I dislike the idea of using text as a medium for it.

I want this AI to be considering whether what I ate this morning had enough protein, whether this ingredient is on sale and in stock nearby, or whether it's in my fridge and what's the expiration date on that. Is there a plan for the other half of the cauliflower? etc.

The last thing I need in a meal is appealing marketing copy for it.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried hello fresh. Unpacking a meal to find a fast food-sized mayonnaise packet as ingredient made me feel deeply sad

Tbh I understand this, it did feel like a lot of plastic waste being left around. But I think it'd be an impossible logistical problem to avoid this in the foreseeable future

When you register for your meals they could ask if you have some of the ingredients.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#29

I used Hello Fresh for a year, not sure if recipe variety was my problem. I think there's a lot of other possibilities to use LLMs in that product though, e.g. to help users express complex preferences, or to create best menus and schedules out of existing recipes. I'd say tampering with recipes would be the worst part of the AI integration. I think it's unfortunate that businesses look into using AI for something es…

I tried hello fresh. Unpacking a meal to find a fast food-sized mayonnaise packet as ingredient made me feel deeply sad

An aunt signed me up for a few free meals through some promotion. I tried it with an open mind but I found the entire experience infuriating.

Most of the meals came with poor quality produce (e.g. tiny unripe avocado — something I never would have grabbed at the grocer) and a silly amount of waste for items I had already.

My least favourite part was the recipes. I’m not sure if it was just the small selection of recipes we got, but it seemed like each one was designed around a template with six photos. As if they had a spreadsheet of all their recipes and required each one to fill six columns so they could just print it out in a predictable way. This meant that if you followed the recipe you would wind up doing several redundant tasks and creating unnecessary dishes. It drove me wild. By the last meal I just read the recipe, looked at the ingredients, and improvised.

A high quality recipe should not only result in a delicious meal but also be efficient and thoughtful about order of operations and clean-up. Having full control over ingredients, HF has no excuse providing low quality recipes, never mind the ingredients.

I would recommend a NYT Cooking subscription and using a grocery delivery app instead.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#30
post #7

I feel like generating recipe ideas/titles is the easy part, and advanced AI techniques are not necessary. Even the article notes that there is not really any difference between 1 round of training and 40 rounds of training with their model. Actually generating a recipe is obviously much harder, and should be effectively impossible unless you include a humanoid robot that can cook and taste. I think the best you coul…

I get all of my recipes from GPT-4 these days. Granted, most of them are just regurgitating a common recipe, but I find that it's able to tweak recipes appropriately if I say "I'm out of X, can I use Y or Z instead?" - I've never actually had a bad recipe come of it.

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