A Recipe for AI
Will ChatGPT and other AI content generators replace food writers? I ask ChatGPT to find out!
Have you played around with ChatGPT yet? You know, the OpenAI chatbot that everyone says will change writing and content creation as we know it?
I have and I will say that it’s pretty fun and way more clever than I expected. It can write a book report from the perspective of an 8th grader, debug someone’s code while explaining what it fixed, and write a hyper niche recipe for a gluten-free, sugar-free egg nog cake including ingredients and instructions.
To put it to the test, I asked it to write a poem in iambic pentameter about SpaghettiOs, and the results were entertaining, to say the least.
There’s a lot of chatter around this technology. On the doom side of the conversation, there are people afraid that ChatGPT will replace all human writers. They fear that, instead of hiring human copywriters, bloggers or SEO writers, companies will opt to use AI to generate blog posts and ad copy.
On the bright side of the conversation, content creators are hopeful that this new technology will help them generate ideas to keep up with an incredibly demanding social media ecosystem.
And on the conspiratorial side of the conversation, people believe ChatGPT is going to successfully predict the future and write us a manual on how to build a time machine.
Whether you like it or not, AI is here to stay. If history has taught us anything it’s that you can’t uninvent something. Once Pandora’s Box is open, that’s it — it’s out in the world.
A new disrupter has entered the “chat” (pun totally intended).
What is ChatGPT?
Based on the latest advances in natural language processing, ChatGPT is a machine-learning model that generates human-like responses to any given input in a way that is engaging and conversational. It was trained on a large dataset of conversational text, and its model continues to be improved upon the more it is engaged with. So the more people give it questions and prompts, the more it learns, “remembering” past conversations and context to sound more and more natural.
We’ve come a long way from sending an AIM message to SmarterChild, the chatbot of the early 2000s.
Will ChatGPT replace food writers?
AI is a brilliant advancement in the Information Era we’re currently living in. But don’t give it that much credit.
Yes, technological advancements do shake up industries, oftentimes making some roles obsolete. Electricity meant no more need for lamp lighters, the men who would manually light gas street lamps every night. The telephone decimated the jobs of telegraphists who would relay messages by telegram. Convenient stores like Wawa took the place of the milkman.
But with every new advancement comes new jobs and industries that work in tandem with that technology. Remember when social media nearly obliterated print but created new industries and jobs where people can make nearly six figures just by creating digital content?
I don’t personally believe that chatbots will replace the whimsical worlds creative writers can weave or have the emotional intelligence to write something so beautiful it will move someone to tears.
Like the smart guy at a party who doesn’t see the irony in the fact that he’s explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect to you, ChatGPT is limited to what it already knows (albeit that’s a lot). ChatGPT can’t interview an expert over the phone about a current event or topical discussion and it will never be able to express one’s unique perspective as eloquently as a human who gained that perspective from a lifetime of experience. And it certainly can’t test that recipe it generated for rosewater and Gochujang pesto pasta which FlavorLab admitted was weird but interesting.
It’s also important to note that AI will be limited by the same systemic problems in our society, as the technology is basically generated from our world. As the ACLU notes in their article How Artificial Intelligence Can Deepen Racial and Economic Inequities, the tech industry’s lack of diversity, the biases embedded in how data is collected and reported, and the discrimination that is still rampant in many institutions will be reflected in AI technology.
All this to say, humans are going to be a necessary part of wrangling AI. We are going to need people to be AI architects and curators to help the systems generate information that is factual, fair, and most importantly, equitable and inclusive. There will still be a need for humans to work in tandem with this technology.
How will AI impact the food media industry?
To learn more about how AI could be used by food writers, I decided to ask ChatGPT what it thought.
It was good at generating ideas and writing prompts, but take it from me, an expert who literally researched Research Methods in college, users SHOULD NOT end their research with ChatGPT. When you sign up it says “While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice.”
But it is a good place to look for inspiration to get your creative juices flowing and prompts to ADD your knowledge and perspective to the conversation.
Below is a conversation between ChatGPT and I about how AI will impact the food media industry.
KL: Explain how AI will impact the food media industry.
ChatGPT: Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly impact the food media industry in several ways:
1.) Recipe recommendation and discovery: AI-powered food recommendation engines can help users discover new recipes and meal ideas based on their past preferences and dietary restrictions.
KL: I think ChatGPT is a good springboard for creating recipe and meal ideas, but the user will still have to do more research on their own. I do like the idea that the engine will get to know your preferences and dietary restrictions. I just hope it doesn’t turn into an algorithm that keeps you in a filter bubble that only feeds you the same stuff. I really want AI to be a place where we can get inspired to try new things.
ChatGPT: 2.) Personalized nutrition plans: AI can be used to create personalized nutrition plans for individuals based on their specific health goals, allergies, and dietary preferences.
KL: Every body is different and conversations about diet, nutrition and health goals should be between you and your doctor — not between you and AI.
ChatGPT: 3.) Food delivery optimization: AI can be used to optimize food delivery routes and predict demand for certain products, helping to reduce waste and improve efficiency.
KL: Fairly certain this is what Amazon is trying to do. Business executives are gonna love the hypothetical numbers of optimized workflows, but stuff like this does not account for the fact that humans are not machines. Humans are going to be the ones to carry out those tasks and when a computer tells a manager that jobs can be done in X amount of time using X amount of resources, that’s what they’re going to expect and they won’t take into account that humans need rest, food, time off and bathroom breaks. This is a recipe for disaster.
ChatGPT: 4.) Recipe creation: AI can be used to create new recipes by analyzing and combining ingredients and flavor profiles from existing recipes.
KL: Again, it’s a great starting point but users will need to test those recipes.
ChatGPT: 5.) Content creation: AI can be used to generate written content, such as recipe descriptions and cooking instructions, as well as video content, such as cooking demonstrations.
KL: This is the thing I’m most excited about, but I’d say “AI can be used to generate written content *ideas.” Don’t begin and end your research or content creation with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT: Overall, AI has the potential to revolutionize the way that people discover, plan, and prepare food, and could significantly impact the food media industry by providing new tools and platforms for content creation and distribution.
So are you ready for AI? Will you be using ChatGPT in your content creation strategy? If so, how are you planning to use it?