Are AI-generated recipes difficult to digest?

“We asked (popular AI chatbot) ChatGPT to create a recipe – the best pizza for Dubai,” says Spartak Arutyunyan, who leads menu development for the city’s branch of restaurant and delivery company Dodo Pizza.

“And a recipe actually emerged. We brought it to market, it was actually a huge success and is still on the menu.”

Ninety percent of Dubai’s three million residents are immigrants, which is why “there are so many cultures here,” says Arutyunyan. “Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Arabs, Europeans.”

He asked ChatGPT to develop a pizza that represented this cultural mix. The answer was a topping of Arabic shawarma chicken, grilled Indian paneer cheese, Middle Eastern za’atar herbs and tahini sauce.

And Dodo Pizza customers apparently can’t get enough of it. “As a chef, I would never mix these ingredients on a pizza, but even so, the blend of flavors was surprisingly good,” says Mr. Arutyunyan.

However, other pizzas designed by the AI ​​did not make it onto the menu, such as strawberries and pasta and blueberries and cereal.

On the other side of the world, in the US, Venecia Willis conducted a similar AI experiment at Velvet Taco in Dallas, where she works as a chef.

She became “really curious” about AI and tasked ChatGPT with creating one of her tacos of the week.

As prompts, Ms. Willis says, she told him to use “about eight ingredients, and he could only choose a tortilla and a protein.”

The results of some recipes were anything but tasty.

“There were some unusual combinations and I wasn’t sure if red curry, coconut tofu and pineapple would taste good together,” says Ms Willis.

However, she tried three of the most promising recipes and finally settled on a shrimp and steak taco, which she offered for public sale. Within a week, they sold 22,000 of them.

“I think AI is a great tool when you’re in a creative slump to get your brain going again – ‘This combination might actually work, let’s try it’. AI can suggest things I might not have thought of.”

But Ms Willis adds that she would not “dismiss AI completely. There has to be a human element to validate recipes.”

However, not everyone in the food industry is keen on the idea of ​​AI. London-based cocktail inventor Julian de Feral says he is opposed to AI because it seems “very counterintuitive” and its decisions lack common sense.

AI chatbots are “not magic,” warns Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Rather, she says they have learned from what they have read online.

“If you can get ChatGPT to spit out something that looks like a recipe, it’s because there are recipes on the Internet.”

She adds that the AI ​​may have stolen the recipe from someone’s cooking blog, causing the blog’s readership to decline and the blog’s ability to survive on subscriptions or advertising revenue to decrease.

However, Professor Bender admits that more sophisticated AI could be helpful in creating prescriptions in the future.

She says you could ask the AI ​​to “categorize ingredients as sweet or sour, etc.,” find the ones the internet says should taste good together, and then develop endless detailed recipes. “However, you have to have a well-defined research question (to ask the AI) to get that benefit,” she adds.

Yet British supermarket chain Waitrose is using AI to identify new food trends on social media. These currently include “Smash Burgers” – crispy burgers made from ground meat cooked in a super-hot pan – and “Crookies” – a croissant filled with cookie dough and chocolate chips.

“We saw smash burgers trending all over social media,” says Lizzie Haywood, innovation manager at Waitrose. “Now, in the UK, three or four dedicated smash burger restaurants have opened to coincide with our launch of our smash burgers.”

As for the crooks, she says the AI ​​detected that social media mentions were “up 80-90% year-on-year, and we managed to roll it out to test stores within three months.”

In Singapore, Italian expat Stefano Cantù has developed an AI-powered app that can suggest recipes when you tell it what ingredients you have in your fridge and cupboards. He has named it “ChefGPT” in reference to the fact that the app is powered by ChatGPT.

“I’m Italian, so of course I cook things,” says Mr. Cantù, who works at a software company by day. He says he came up with the idea “over a weekend” after asking ChatGPT for recipe inspiration.

The app also has dropdown menus and toggles that allow a user to indicate what tools they have in their kitchen, or if they are in a rush or are not a particularly good cook, and the AI ​​will then suggest a recipe and a picture of the dish.

Mr Cantù says he gained 30,000 users within a week and a half of launching last year, but then he received “a pretty big bill from OpenAI,” the company behind ChatGPT.

He continues to pay OpenAI a regular fee for using the AI. Mr. Cantù explains that this is a standard arrangement when a startup like his builds its app on top of another company’s technology.

He adds that he is still trying to “find the right balance between advertising and subscriptions, as well as the right level of usage for free users,” and how to “monetize free users without selling their data.”

Back in Dubai, Spartak Arutyunyan of Dodo Pizza says AI should be viewed as something fun to eat, rather than something you base your entire menu on.

But Dodo Pizza is now allowing customers in Dubai who order through the app to invent unusual pizza toppings themselves using AI. And the company says it plans to expand the AI ​​feature to its other outlets worldwide.