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Comment by cush

3 hours ago

> Feels like I'm being condescended to and treated like a child

Curious why that feels condescending? Like, the average person who is seeking a recipe needs a photo to know what to shoot for

> Like, the average person who is seeking a recipe needs a photo to know what to shoot for

The menu: Rosemary and garlic roast lamb, Extra-crispy roast potatoes, Honey-roasted carrots and parsnips, broccoli.

The photo: [1] Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, baby carrots, broccoli, brussels sprouts. No lamb, no parsnips.

If you shoot for what's in the photo, you're going to have a bad time.

You're also going to have a bad time when you try to make an apple crumble with no flour, no sugar, and no butter, because they're not on the shopping list.

[1] https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/gyzrX8zp3O2KLEPm0FAqh...

  • I've heard of other people for years now trusting AI for recipes, and it's a rare area that I simply can't bring myself to take seriously.

    I feel like it can only be successful by luck. Either it's reproducing a recipe verbatim that was tried and validated and tasted by a human, in which case, we didn't need AI for that, just a searchable cookbook. Or, it's making one up. I understand that using RLHF has helped improve the quality of questions about history, programming, or TV show recommendations, but I do not believe that there has been some kind of training regime where people prompt the models for "a recipe that uses X, Y, Z random ingredients," follow the recipe, and then score it. And even if they do, I don't see how a model can learn enough from that besides "this exact recipe is good/bad." '1/2 tsp cumin' may be a great addition to one recipe and not enough for another, so improving the output based on a bunch of scored recipes... I just don't believe cooking is an LLM job.

    Maybe some other kind of model that I don't know about.

The first thing the user sees should directly answer the question they asked. Not a different question. They didn’t ask what a roast looks like.

The user is probably in a grocery store. They need to buy the stuff first. Showing them a picture of a finished product is an irrelevant distraction.

Then, if there is some arguably relevant content you can tack it on afterwards.

Genuine question - do they? Unless it's something like a fancy cake then instructions should really tell you everything about stacking. Half the recipes are mixed anyway (curry, stir fry, stews, ...), lots of other are either stacked or separated on the plate. So apart from the really exceptional stuff, to people really need to know "what you shoot for"?