Comment by xp84
1 day ago
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.
If you’re already very experienced at cooking AI recipes are amazing. They cut to the chase and provide a good enough outline without all the preamble
In case you or anyone else in this thread hasn't come across it, https://www.recipesource.com/ is basically the same but curated.
I was going to ask why it’s not the first result in Google but the expired cert and invalid CN explains it.
Same here, I’ve been cooking for myself and later also my wife since 2005, even when baking I rarely need exact amounts, for cooking I essentially never follow the recipe directly and adapt them as needed, without ever changing them from the original.
I mostly don’t even need a recipe from AI, just the title and a 1-2 sentence description.
LLMs for recipes are good if you just want to make a thing, not necessarily the best version of that thing. It's nice being able to ask questions about certain steps as well, or ingredient substitutions if needed. It'll make a nice, average, recipe (unless I suppose you prompt for something). That's perfectly fine for most cooking, and often what you want when you're making a dish for the first time.
I've had some really good experiences with cocktail recipes and Claude. It's got access to my barcart inventory, general tastes, and general desired level of effort.
I feel like the technique recommendations are probably the most valuable element, but I'm getting rave reviews like 85% of the time now?
There have been a couple times where I was out of an ingredient and it proposed an adjustment that sounded a little wild to me, but it almost always is well received.
You're right, we don't need AI for that, we need a searchable cookbook.
Unfortunately, one does not exist.
The Internet, however, is full of garbage cooking advice, and while AI is quite happy to parrot that garbage, it's not significantly worse than it's sources.
I wanted to correct you and bring up my favorite website that had filters for the ingredients you want/don't want to use, type of dish, and time for cooking, but it appears that in a last month it was sold and now it links to the slop site with no useful filtering. I used this site as a quick lookup for recipe ideas for 7 years now.
Fuck. Does nothing good survive on the internet anymore.
What, you've never owned a cookbook?
The physical ones have indices, and the digital ones usually do as well (plus string search).
I own multiple physical cookbooks.
I often find their contents to be both incredibly broad, and incredibly shallow, and often lead to dishes that don't quite suit my tastes.
I have generally had more success with the internet than I have with them.
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