Lauren DeMarse
Professor Peeples
Intro into Academic Writing
9/19/23
Imagine this, you’re walking home from being on the beach on a hot summer day, you’re sweaty and uncomfortable and you get the idea to treat yourself to an ice cream sundae. How perfect!
In the summer going into my senior year, I worked at an old, family owned ice cream shop in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware where my job was to make many different types of ice cream treats, including sundaes. There are several ways of making ice cream sundaes, but the traditional way is the way I was taught on my first day on the job. When I asked the AI “how to make a traditional ice cream sundae”, the answer I received included 5 bullet points with the ingredients listed above. A distinction of the answer AI gave me was it seemed like the answer was a basic, specific recipe, with little flexibility or creativity. With just a few takeaways, the ingredients were similar to what I had been taught in my summer job but it lacked specifics or addressed how to change that basic recipe to meet the specific wants of the customer or consumer.
An article I found about asking AI for food recipes is titled “AI Recipes Are Bad for Everyone” written by Jaya Saxena. The article highlights different trends AI uses when asking for food recipes. For example, the writer of this article “Jaya Saxena” added she had attended a Chili cookoff in which one contestant raved that their “bone marrow chili” they had made with the recipe they received after typing into Chat GBT. When tasting the so-called “best” chili recipe that came from Chat GBT the result was “bland and mealy”. This example shows the unproven methods of AI recipes, and when you have something as personal as a food recipe, providing user feedback, reviews and proven methods is a must.
The concluding question is “is AI a good tool for recipes?” Unfortunately, because they don’t seem to solve any problems in the kitchen, the answer is no. If the problem is ensuring a recipe is trusted from a reliable source, the information given from AI doesn’t show anything that should be trusted, rather just a fact that observes knowledge. In the ice cream sundae example, AI gives specific, but not flexible instructions.