Struggling to find a recipe for the Thanksgiving holiday or want new ideas on how to use all those turkey day leftovers?
Artificial intelligence could help.
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New AI-powered recipe generators are combining traditional food blogging with computer programming, using generative artificial intelligence to change the way people plan for and prepare meals.
“Just searching online or browsing through cookbooks, you might find a couple. But with AI you can generate a lot of different ideas and then find the one that best suits your needs,” said Andrew Olson, a software developer who also was a food blogger for many years before founding DishGen.
It’s one of many AI-powered recipe generators that have been created in recent years.
For DishGen, you go to the website and type in the ingredients you have or the dish you’d like to try, along with any dietary restrictions you might have.
The AI will then generate a new recipe with a description, ingredients and steps.
“As a food blogger over eight or 10 years, I maybe developed hundreds of recipes. On DishGen there have been millions of recipes generated over the last year,” Olson said.
What about food and recipe safety?
Olson said you should always use common sense when using anything generated by AI.
But, he adds, DishGen has worked to make sure its recipes make sense and are safe.
“There’s several layers, actually. A part of it is just making sure that words that shouldn’t be included in a recipe are blocked,” Olson said. “It’ll check itself, it’ll have a sense of self-awareness to say, ‘Is this something that should be included in a recipe?’”
Another benefit Olson talked about is being able to use AI generators to adjust recipes for different serving sizes.