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Food and Generative AI

engineering.hellofresh.com

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Re: Food and Generative AI

#41

Post by mstade »

Xerox9213 wrote: post #29
tomjakubowski wrote: post #6

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

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 reci…

This was my experience with hello fresh as well. Subpar produce and absolutely useless recipes. It feels like the ingredients and recipes are the things this company focuses on the least, never trying them again and I actively dissuade people from using them whenever it comes up in conversation.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#42

Post by swatcoder »

famouswaffles wrote: post #39
burkaman wrote: 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…

>Actually generating a recipe is obviously much harder, and should be effectively impossible unless you include a humanoid robot that can cook and taste. It's not because this necessary information is already implicit in the sum of all the data it is trained on.

I can't imagine any cook or chef who believes that all the necessary information for all good recipes has been captured in text, let alone in the text that's been digitized and made available for training.

That's not to say that LLM's can't mash together reasonable new recipes for certain audiences, especially for variations on popular modern standards, but the idea that their working space of recipes is exhaustive across all cuisine and tastes is absurd.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#43

Post by groggo »

Xerox9213 wrote: post #29
tomjakubowski wrote: post #6

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

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 reci…

I agree about the issues - (sometimes) poor quality produce, lots of tiny bits of waste, sometimes template-y feeling meals. Also very expensive, and sometimes not enough food.

But overall I really like it. I actually learned a lot about cooking. The meals aren't complicated, and they follow similar patterns, so you start picking up on things. Like seasoning in layers (they tell you to salt & pepper at multiple steps), how to improve flavors with stock, spices, how to make presentation nice. And they're all pretty quick. After a while I have a nice library of recipe cards, and now I just pick a few of them when I go to the grocery store and get the ingredients myself. And even though sometimes it doesn't feel like enough food, it almost always comes out perfect. Sometimes I'll augment the amount of rice or something like that.

So I like HelloFresh, and maybe eventually I'll graduate to more interesting meals like NYT Cooking. But HelloFresh is quick, easy, and usually good.

What do you mean about "creating unnecessary dishes"?

Re: Food and Generative AI

#44

Post by simonw »

tornato7 wrote: post #21
burkaman wrote: 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.

Yeah I've found GPT-4 to be surprisingly good at recipes. I think that's because it's effectively serving up the "average" recipe for anything you ask it for, based on everything it's scraped from the internet... which usually ends up being a good recipe.

I love being able to challenge it with "and now make it vegan" etc to see what it comes up with.

This is also another example of the thing where having a randomly unreliable teacher is actually quite useful if you're trying to learn to cook - because it forces you to question what it tells you, apply your own intuition and think carefully about what worked and what didn't.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#45

Post by swatcoder »

tornato7 wrote: post #21
burkaman wrote: 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.

If you think about how it works, it's going to have a strong representation of oft-published recipes and oft-published substitutions and will be able to mash those together into plausible original recipes that are adjacent to them. Making a satisfying meal for a few people with comparatively mainstream tastes should be pretty reliable.

But the more esoteric you go, aiming for something really novel or something unusually historic/traditional/regional, or the more technical and delicate, the more it'll turn to hallucinating naive text continuations that will lead you astray. An experienced cook will know to spot the weird stuff and revise on the fly; an inexperienced one is going to end up with some... odd dishes.

It's the same as many of us see when used for code assistance. It's great at inventing "original" boilerplate which inspiration has been exhaustively covered in source material, but gets real wacky and unreliable the more you move away from that.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#46

Post by gffrd »

tornato7 wrote: post #20
valyagolev wrote: post #4

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…

As someone with a few allergies, I effectively had to throw away and replace a third to half of the ingredients in every Hello Fresh meal. That's the #1 reason I stopped using it. An AI should be able to know what to substitute to make the whole kit edible for me.

Are you thinking "Rather than having a cook compose recipes with 1000 variations based on permutations of allergies, just produce one recipe with intended outcome, and let an AI figure out the variants"?

How do you train an AI on taste?

Would a chef state what's allowable for a recipe? "This one you can sub the soy out, but this one falls apart without it"

Re: Food and Generative AI

#47

Post by [deleted] »

guhidalg wrote: post #11
breakingciphers wrote: post #2

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

I run a recipe management website for my friends and family as personal passion project: https://letscooktime.com . People eat with their eyes. You *need* good images. Traditionally this meant expensive food photography, but now you can use AI to generate images. The challenge is that the image may not look like the real meal, but anyway 90% of people scrolling by won't make the recipe anyway so that's probably accep…

[deleted]

Re: Food and Generative AI

#48

Post by jprete »

guhidalg wrote: post #11
breakingciphers wrote: post #2

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

I run a recipe management website for my friends and family as personal passion project: https://letscooktime.com . People eat with their eyes. You *need* good images. Traditionally this meant expensive food photography, but now you can use AI to generate images. The challenge is that the image may not look like the real meal, but anyway 90% of people scrolling by won't make the recipe anyway so that's probably accep…

Fake food images are literally fraud. I’m also having trouble believing that this is a passion project for friends and family based on your 90% comment.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#50

Post by gffrd »

scudsworth wrote: post #24
tornato7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"steak frites lasagna with cream base and avocado mash tartare"
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