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Food and Generative AI

engineering.hellofresh.com

51–60 of 100 posts

Re: Food and Generative AI

#51
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you search for recipes, how many recipes do you view before you decide to make one?

It's a stretch to call it fraud when there's no guarantee what you make at home will look like what's made in a test kitchen. I challenge you to try to do food photography well at home without thousands in photography equipment, props, the actual dish, and expertise in making it look enticing on camera.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

…and then hand-packing to include or remove individual ingredients on a per-order basis? As someone with a significant ERP & warehouse implementation at work, that sounds very expensive and error-prone. Unfortunately :(

exactly. "hello fresh" is a logistical, not culinary challenge, i think. but same goes, probably, for any huge restaurant chain as well.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

…and then hand-packing to include or remove individual ingredients on a per-order basis? As someone with a significant ERP & warehouse implementation at work, that sounds very expensive and error-prone. Unfortunately :(

at their scale and specialization, I'd hope this is done robotically... ?

Re: Food and Generative AI

#54
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 don't agree, even a human chef with decades of experience in all the tools and ingredients they're using is not going to get every recipe right on the first try. I'm not saying an AI recipe will never be good, but it is going to make mistakes sometimes.

If you're wondering whether a task is theoretically possible for an AI, I think a good rule of thumb is to ask "could a human domain expert do this given a few days and as much research material as they need". If the task here is "develop a novel recipe without trying it", the answer is no. You can't predict the interactions of every possible combination of ingredients and processes no matter how much time and experience you have.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#55

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 marke…

This is exactly how I feel. I want it to actually be helpful. It needs to be able to: - track what I have (if I have input that data) and how soon anything may expire - track what I made but haven't finished eating (just a few quick pictures in the fridge should update that as needed, or maybe it's time we all get that Alton Brown in-fridge camera to talk to) - can I use this in something else? How long should it sti…

As complex as it might be, the "intelligence" would probably be the easy part. Aggregating that data in a way that didn't become a burden for the user--either because its tedious, or because they don't trust you--would be quite a trick.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 a…

It doesn't matter what the cook thinks.

Predictors don't just grok what is explicitly stated in a dataset but also what is implied by its structure.

In a language model trained on protein sequences alone and nothing else, you will find biological structure and function emerge in the inner layers.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2016239118

Language Models are predictors. If the text you give them is the shadow in Plato's cave, they don't try to draw shadows, they try to build walls. They are trying to reverse engineer the computation that must have led to that output. They will not stop at "surface level similarity" or "plausible" by choice. They will train until they have completely succeeded or until the architecture or data fail them.

With a capable enough architecture and sufficient data, there is no recipe a predictor couldn't divine with enough training.

For the perfect predictor of recipes, Is the architecture capable enough ? Is the data sufficient (both variance and quantity) ?

I'm not sure but this is not a question a cook can answer.

The OP claimed

>Actually generating a recipe is obviously much harder, and should be effectively impossible unless you include a humanoid robot that can cook and taste.

This is just false. And you don't need the hypothetical perfect predictor (just a capable one) to see it.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#57

All the luddites here, weird for a place called "hacker news"

people who understand the underlying tech are frequently the most annoyed by hype cycles

Random thing that came to my mind related to that. Back in 2015-2017 when the tesla P85D came out and then the P100D, lots and lots of car "experts" had their money taken in drag races and rolling street races. It was just a simple google search away that it did a 10.5 1/4 mile yet slower cars that had no chance would legitimately bet hundreds on a quick race just to lose. Moral of the story, these people understood their street racing and drag racing worlds very well, but it took a few years to put their bias aside when breakthrough were being made every year.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#58
It's kind of funny-- I'm a technical visual artist, classically trained (former) chef, and spent a long time as a web developer in an environment where people breathlessly spoke about the possibility of LLMs. (Auto-correcting OCR was my pet wish that I never fulfilled.) It's been... interesting seeing layman's usually naive and mistaken takes on generative AI performing these functions.

The difficult part of recipe development is testing, and professional recipe authors pay a lot for it. (It was regularly available pickup work when I was in culinary school.) Professionals don't use recipes like home cooks do: ours are much simpler, tend to combine ratios and amounts with known techniques, and assume knowledge that most home cooks don't have. Home cook recipes tolerate people who don't really know what "4 lbs turned radishes glace w/sherry" means, where nearly any professional cook familiar with classical european cooking could grab the half dozen ingredients and equipment without clarification and perform the technique almost identically to another cook across the world. It's not rocket science, but even with clear instructions, there's a lot of technique there that you just have to do at least a few times to get a sense of it in a really basic way.

Writing recipes for home cooks poses the same challenges developers have writing documentation for people who aren't familiar with the codebase they're documenting. Home cooks consistently execute things like "Saute" much differently than a chef might assume they would, use seasoning very differently, measure doneness by the amount of time cooked rather than using internal temperatures, textures and smells, need measurements for "pinches" of things and use volumetric measurements instead of weights, and and all sorts of other things. For a home cook recipe, the professional instruction, "hard sear, glaze, and brown in the broiler" would need likely need specific times, settings, pans, and things like that... and the temperature of home cooking equipment, the initial temperature of the ingredients, slight variations in salt or sugar content, all have a significant chance of making that recipe fail. I guarantee you that when, say, Gordon Ramsay writes a cookbook, rather than writing the recipes himself, he goes into a R&D kitchen, cooks the dishes with those cooks who know how home cooks do things, and they write the actual recipes that go in the books.

So like almost every other "hey lets replace some creative/technical person with this generative AI" initiative I've seen, this would do the easiest 95% that takes 5% of the time while not addressing the most difficult 5% that takes 95% of the time. When someone asks Midjourney to make, oh, say, a sexy elf in the style of Thomas Kinkaid or whatever Midjourney users want these days, they might not be a professional artist, but since they're the consumer, they can judge whether the elf looks appropriately sexy or stylistically enough like Thomas Kinkaid. Getting a recipe spit out like this requires technical judgement that any user who'd rely on such a device would almost certainly lack.

Fortunately/Unfortunately it seems pretty difficult to devalue professional cooking as a skill any more than it already has been, and your average pro doesn't have much exposure to this sort of market anyway, so I'm not really worried about industry impact compared to, say, concept artists for video games... Though I think workaday utility developers are more squarely on the chopping block than most. However, I feel for the home cooks who'll faithfully follow these recipes expecting similar results to what they get from foodnetwork.com, simply recipes, the new york times food section, or whatever other source they get recipes from.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 don't agree, even a human chef with decades of experience in all the tools and ingredients they're using is not going to get every recipe right on the first try. I'm not saying an AI recipe will never be good, but it is going to make mistakes sometimes. If you're wondering whether a task is theoretically possible for an AI, I think a good rule of thumb is to ask "could a human domain expert do this given a few days…

>> You can't predict the interactions of every possible combination of ingredients and processes no matter how much time and experience you have.

That's just the thing machines do better than humans. Not sure about LLM's though.

Re: Food and Generative AI

#60
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…

seems like there's a high potential for the AI to hallucinate and get confused with ingredient measurements... last I checked, LLMs struggle with numbers.
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