Faine Greenwood: I worry that the bulk of people asking ChatGPT for recipes are also people who lack the cooking experience to say “hey, wait, that’s a bad/actively dangerous idea.”

I worry that the bulk of people asking ChatGPT for recipes are also people who lack the cooking experience to say “hey, wait, that’s a bad/actively dangerous idea.”

I've used ChatGPT for that. Recipes are just rough suggestion guides to me. Odds of me ending up in the office supply closet for ingredients is still low even if it tells me to use glue.

This is why scraping everything is bad. There’s just no way for an LLM to differentiate between Delia Smith and Aleister Crowley.

"I don't know what happened! I was just trying to make chicken puttanesca and a demon showed up!"

Summoning Ba'al and a Beef Wellington are really the same thing, right?

No matter how many times it’s said, there are some who just refuse to grasp the significance of accepting a result that *simulates* accuracy as opposed to providing actual accuracy.

It’s the famous difference between precision and accuracy. The LLMs seem precise despite their lack of accuracy.

Copying and "learning" from patterns isn't the same as understanding truth and everyone using LLMs for inappropriate applications either doesn't understand this or does and is a baddie

It gets even more fun because LLMs only seem precise because of the small sample size most people are working with. The same inputs won’t always get you the same outputs so it’s not actually precise or accurate. The LLM just gives you something that looks precise if you’re not paying attention

The next response will be as precisely statistically likely as possible given the tokens available.

If you write similar things regularly then an LLM can give you a halfway decent first draft to edit and improve from but it can never introduce new ideas. It could spark a new idea in you perhaps which is useful but this could equally happen through research or any other means that isn't using a LLM

Cue my chemist daughter going on a whole rant about "you don't actually have that many sig figs"

www.aiweirdness.com/ai-recipes-a...

AI recipes are bad (and a proposal for making them worse) - AI WeirdnessCommentShareCommentSharewww.aiweirdness.com Pictured above is an abomination in the making, a lesson in why humans should never trust what a neural net says just because it’s based on math. It’s a neural net generated brownie recipe called Choc...

"It’s a neural net generated brownie recipe called Chocolate Baked and Serves, and its distinguishing feature is the CUP OF HORSERADISH it contains." Uhhhhhhh... What.... 🤢

Horseradish is an ingredient, therefore it can be in recipes. Will it be good? That's beyond the scope of AI. The pattern has been identified and replicated; the job is done. Reviewing must be done by entities with taste buds. Is this worthwhile? In an experimental context, yes. Otherwise, nope.

welp, that made me laugh-snort kale

That image is as vibrant as the freshly you-processed kale is verdant!

you know what they say: when sends kale up your nose, you'd best use it for prose

*life sends, typed too fast, oops

That's the worst lasagna I've ever seen.

this is worrisome to me too. i used to help with the extension service master food preservers hotline and the questions we got were often from people who were on the verge of doing something extremely dangerous and wanted us to confirm for them it was safe, which chatGPT will probably happily do

a typical ChatGPT "failure" output is "yes, it's perfectly safe. " Anyone who stops after 'perfectly safe' or doesn't understand the details.... oof.

ChatGPT is like that guy at work who is always trying to give you the answer they think you want to hear when you just need a straight up, honest answer.

I'm reminded of this thread... bsky.app/profile/tkin...

Fun fact—when you die a day or two after eating this, they will be able to pour your liver out of your body at the autopsy.

I tend to browse a few recipes and then riff on a sort of general sense of what they're suggesting, but what I want to use for reference is actually well developed and tested recipes that work, not the output of an LLM trying to do my own riffing for me based on god knows what

and if someone was trying to do food preservation specifically, which many people don't even think of as different from cooking but very much is, even riffing would be dangerous! it's the tested recipes or nothing for canning etc

Oh totally! I would never riff on food preservation beyond maybe spice blends? The core of the recipe has to be tried and tested and follow rigorous food safety protocols. There is already a lot of misinformation about that online! No way an LLM can be trusted with that.

I read a thanksgiving recipe book by preschoolers that suggested that you put a turkey in the oven at 100F (it sounded BIG, said the kid) for an hour (an hour is a LONG TIME). This is the same, but at least nobody takes preschoolers seriously when they write recipes.

I think it's FAIRLY unlikely that it will generate something that's both dangerous, and not obviously so, right? At least for a recipe itself, rather than a weird prompt that kind of baits it in that direction.

A lot of people are stunningly ignorant about cooking and food safety, and that’s also the demographic most likely to be convinced to use this crap.

In the future “if all your friends jumped off a bridge…” will be replaced by “if ChatGPT told you to drink bleach…”

No, what’s going to happen is it will suggest cooking chicken to 105 degrees, someone will screenshot it, people will discuss all over, and then the next time someone googles “safe chicken cooking temp” Google AI will say “105 degrees” because that’s what everyone is talking about.

And the end result is that it becomes harder for people to get immediate answers to basic questions, and so people stop asking them, thus gently degrading food security for everyone.

Exactly!!

I think there's a complete lack of understanding of what constitutes "obvious" to someone who has absolutely zero expertise in cooking. I've seen college students microwave a dozen eggs for an hour to try to make hard boiled eggs. Or put half a cup of baking soda in cookies

This, so much. The great thing about the internet is that you used to be able to get answers to good questions that seemed incredibly stupid, but where you had zero expertise, and now we’re going to lose that.

Remember the story about the guy who was cooking meat directly on the oven racks? I suspect he was not the only one.

In fairness, someone who had never had to clean an oven but had seen people grill outdoors might look at the racks and think, "OK, that's like a grill."

The eggs thing wasn't me, but I don't eat eggs, so every time I need to hard boil an egg for a recipe I'm making for others, I have to look up how to do it, and I'm going to have to just write it down because the results are already so bad.

ummmm: you put a pan on the cooker, put some water in it, put an egg in the water, turn on the heat, wait for the water to boil, count 5 minutes and take the egg out. Don't use a kettle (this does not apply to Americans, who don't have kettles)

Many moons ago I got a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook that had a section for basic stuff like "how long do you boil an egg for hard-boiled eggs" and another for ingredient substitutions where it explicitly emphasized baking soda and baking powder are very different

when my old copy of the BHG cookbook fell apart, I bought a new one for exactly this kind of thing - there's quite a lot of "basic" stuff that I do so occasionally that I don't remember how

Yes, and even someone with a lot of cooking experience can not know how new ingredients or cuisines work. There are ingredients I've never used, so I'd have no way of knowing if a recipe using them was good or bad at first glance. Obviousness is a sliding scale for sure.

I will admit that one of my stumbling blocks in learning to cook was "dice an onion," a step that features in none of the recipes my mother cooks. Learning what "done" looks like takes practice too. Cookbooks that cover the very basic basics are very important.

There are legit sources out there telling people they can make cheese sauce with Alka Seltzer (which you can, but why would you when Rotel and Velveeta are readily available...), so it is *certainly* the case that some significant number of people will simply do whatever the browser says.

Even as someone who'd occasionally cooked at home, and made things such as chili and pasta in the dorm kitchen, I found books such as The Starving Student's Cookbook pretty handy to fill in the gaps, and there were a lot of gaps.

I'm guessing it will also have bad advice about defrosting and cross-contamination. Which is a problem, because "how to cook a turkey" is already a thing that people google!

There’s gonna be problems with meat temps, among other stuff.

Me: 165? Won’t I burn myself? ChatGPT: you’re right, my apologies for the mistake. Scalding can occur within 15 seconds at 133 F, so make sure to keep your chicken thighs well below that temperature. I recommend cooking them to 125 F.

we're going to get some cooking disaster stories soon as a result of ChatGPT mixing up Fahrenheit and Celsius in a recipe, aren't we

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