It is the year 1999, a fresh summer Saturday morning that makes you wish you’d worn more than just your Cantona shirt; my brother and I have been driven into Tunbridge Wells by my Dad, as per our Saturday morning routine, and we have just met up with him as agreed at the entrance to WH Smiths. He will have completed a circuit that took in HMV, M&S and Fenwicks and will have bags full of food shopping, clothes and a secret bag full of the most recent DVD and chart CD releases that he will have to smuggle into the house due to a ban having been placed on purchases of that order by my mum. My brother and I will have completed a circuit that took in Route One, Footlocker, Game and maybe the sports shop on the hill, and we will have no purchases but plenty of ideas to seed with regard to new trainers, roller skates and clothes that we deem essential for our continued development. Before setting off we had agreed on the time and place to meet, and thus we were there. When my dad turns up he has a very exciting bag in addition to those we’re accustomed to seeing. It is a navy blue paper bag with the words Carphone Warehouse printed across it. Inside? Little more than a WAP-enabled Nokia mobile phone. Not his first mobile, no sir, but he’s been talked into this new one for its internet capabilities, a factor that seems equal parts insanely cool and completely pointless. I recall him explaining what the new phone could do as we walked back to the car. I remember my initial ecstasy at this badass new toy dulling fast. “I doubt we’re ever going to sit around watching films on our phones,” I distinctly remember saying from the back of our Toyota Previa as I returned to perusing the CDs and DVDs that were much more a part of my immediate future. It would be almost a full decade before the internet capabilities of that phone became essential rather than theoretically useful. And I have no way of even playing DVDs nowadays.
Self-indulgent nostalgia aside, what’s my point you might ask. Well, I’ve been tentatively dipping my toe in the fast-evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically with the text and image-generating technology that are capturing imaginations at the moment.
In layman’s terms, these bots, or artificial intelligence platforms, enable one to input prompts for all sorts of things and they will respond to you and generate whatever is appropriate given what you’ve asked of it. ChatGPT, for example, enables users to ask questions or tell a story, and the bot will respond with relevant, natural-sounding answers and topics. The interface is designed to simulate a human conversation, creating natural engagement with the bot. Dall.E-2 works similarly but for image generation. The image below is the result of typing, “watercolour painting of watermelon on bright blue chopping board with large knife”:
So, between ChatGPT, Dall.E-2 and letsfoodie.com, I’ve been transported back to that moment in Tunbridge Wells, trying to make sense of the exciting potential of this new technology. Much like then, my knee-jerk reaction is that the potential of the tech I’m faced with does not tally with any desires I might have now or in the future, but much like then, I know I’m limited by the scope of my imagination and my limited knowledge of what the tech industry might have in store for me and for itself in the decade to come.
I was alerted to the potential of ChatGPT at Christmas this year. I was told how companies are using it to write simple pitches and scripts and job adverts, since then headlines have tickled me into further forays into its potential, especially the recent headline that a judge in Colombia used ChatGPT to help decipher a ruling on a nuanced court case. I’ve also been toying with getting good images out of Dall.E-2 to use for cookbook proposals and this newsletter, I suspect my prompts need finessing, although I could equally be missing the point and the potential altogether. I was also alerted to letsfoodie.com, an AI recipe generator when a friend suggested checking it out after a recent newsletter, they did preface the suggestion with the fact that the resulting recipes were a little mundane, which I can confirm is true, although again I fear it is me that is mundane and not the technology. If AI is a mirror to our own peculiarities and desires, which I suspect it might be, then my recent research reflects back a slightly dull cook with limited capabilities, a nagging anxiety of mine at the best of times.
My initial reaction to discovering ChatGPT was that I wanted to simply ask it to write a cookbook for me and to publish its resulting manuscript unedited. Unfortunately, its output seemed limited to a few hundred words so this idea fell flat (for now). Since then though I’ve dipped in for a few fact-finding forays and I thought I would publish those searches and the results below. These are just the first 8 prompts and commands I typed into the interface. The resulting text is copied and pasted verbatim, hence its strangeness at times. With some finessing of my prompts and of the output, I suspect these could become quite good. I’ve also attached an AI-generated image using the same prompts, I think they’re rather good, don’t you?
I’m not 100% sure why I’m sharing these, but equally, I’m not 100% sure why I’d use ChatGPT anyway at the moment. At its simplest, it seems a slightly worse version of Google, and at its most complex it seems like an only vaguely engaged intern whose work gets me some of the ways to a finished idea, but I know I am going to have to do the bulk of the finalising, finessing and finishing myself.
As I have said above, I have a history of completely missing the point and potential of new technology whilst also being drawn to its shiny newness like a dog to a chew toy. I’d love to know if you’ve been drawn to exploring AI’s potential as a cook. What you’ve commanded from it, what you’d like it to explain or compute or solve for you.
Explain the maillard reaction
The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that gives browned and flavorful compounds in food. It occurs when food is heated, and is responsible for the complex flavors and aromas associated with toasted bread, roasted meat, seared steak, and many other cooked foods. The reaction typically begins at temperatures around 140-165°C, and the products formed depend on the type of sugar and amino acid involved, as well as the temperature and cooking time. The Maillard reaction is also known as the "browning reaction".
Write a full recipe and introduction for a traditional English pie with a suet crust and incorporating flavours from colonial India. Include an explanation as to which spices have been used, and why, given Britain's spice trading history.
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