AI in Your Kitchen: Fun or Frightening
AI in Your Kitchen: Fun or Frightening
Apple just dropped iOS 18, and boy, does it come with some shiny new toys! One big highlight? Apple Intelligence, a fresh dose of artificial intelligence woven right into the system. Apple’s not the only one. Samsung’s Galaxy S24 is rocking Galaxy AI, and Google’s got its own AI brainchild, Gemini, lined up for its phones soon. Exciting? Not so fast.
AI in your kitchen might not be the best recipe.
Let’s talk cooking. AI has tried stepping into the kitchen before, and it hasn’t always gone smoothly. In 2022, the YouTube cooking channel Tasty pitted a chocolate cake recipe made by GPT-3 against one crafted by a professional food writer.
Spoiler alert: the human won. The AI cake came out too sweet and dry, while the pro’s version was rich, moist, and full of balanced flavors. It’s clear—AI may be smart, but can it whip up a cake Grandma would be proud of? Not so much.
Fast forward to now, and companies are hyping up AI as your new kitchen assistant. Ask Siri to suggest a dinner plan with what you’ve got in the fridge, and boom, Apple Intelligence will serve up recipes. Sounds handy, right? Except, here’s the kicker: AI sometimes messes up, big time.
Case in point: last year, an AI recipe bot gave someone a recipe for “aromatic water mix.” The problem?
It included bleach and ammonia.
Yeah, that’s not a fun drink; that’s deadly chlorine gas.
Yikes. It’s one thing to have an AI bot churn out a bland dinner, but no one signed up for a side of hazardous chemicals.
For food bloggers and professional recipe developers, AI is more than just a glitchy kitchen helper—it’s a potential job thief.
Enter the Leung sisters, Sarah and Kaitlin, who run the popular food blog The Woks of Life with their parents. For them, recipe development is an art. They don’t just toss ingredients into an algorithm; they spend weeks, sometimes months, fine-tuning each dish. The family’s recipes are packed with personal stories and cultural insights, making every dish feel like a culinary trip home. AI can’t replicate that heart and soul.
Sarah told NPR that AI might be able to generate a passable recipe, but it’s missing the magic. “What kind of meat are you using? How salty is it? Is the cheese too much or just right?” These are the details that make human-created recipes stand out. AI just scrapes the web for data and throws it together, hoping for the best. Not exactly gourmet.
Andrew Olson, the brains behind One Ingredient Chef, has a different take. He’s been tinkering with AI in the kitchen since 2019. To him, AI is just a tool—something that can spark new ideas, but not a complete replacement for human creativity. He even built DishGen, a site that lets you input ingredients and get AI-generated recipes. He’s careful, though.
No “bleach smoothies” here! Olson made sure the system won’t generate dangerous recipes.
So, can AI be useful in the kitchen? Maybe. Olson thinks it can help people brainstorm or speed up the process, but it’s not going to steal your grandma’s secret sauce anytime soon. And honestly, who wants a recipe without the story behind it? Sarah Leung sums it up perfectly: “The stories and connections we make through recipes are so deeply human.” AI can whip up a list of ingredients, sure. But it can’t taste. It can’t experience. It can’t love.
AI in the kitchen? Fun? Maybe. A little scary? Definitely. Would you trust it with your next family dinner? I’m looking for a subsitution.
