Hacker News Reader

Comment by kpcyrd | Hacker News Reader

As somebody who cooks quite a lot (for a diverse set of people), I have the opposite experience of what you describe (also I hate having to touch my screen while cooking).

The cooking book scene has been openly criticized for not actually trying the recipes, even before LLMs were a thing[0]. Regular cooking websites have always been somewhat unusable due to massive ads and fluff text because 1) SEO and 2) recipes are not copyrightable, but the fluff text is.

For quite some time I get my recipes directly from chatgpt, the instructions are very condense, they work quite well, and most importantly: It knows how to substitute ingredients. "My friend is vegan and allergic to heat-resistant soy protein" and it's going to adjust accordingly.

[0]: https://www.matchingfoodandwine.com/news/blog/recipes-that-d...

View on HN

What the hell is the "cooking book scene"? You make it sound like some cabal of cooking book writers sitting in some basement, conspiring to lead people astray. Nobody is saying that all cooking books are great, of course there are loads of shitty cooking books, and of course you are free to criticize that, even openly if you dare. I somehow cope by buying the good ones.

My experience with LLM recipes is like with pretty much everything else these things generate: usually very mediocre, mixed with glaring errors in between. If you are an experienced cook, you'll be able to manage since you'll recognize the errors.

In another comment, you say photos are required. I would claim that the cooking book scene is the publisher interest in the limited shelf space for photo-heavy cookbooks. Celebrity and TV chefs thoroughly represented.

Books without photos (McGee, Hewitt, Potter, Julia Child) are not interesting to publishers.

So you're allegedly annoyed with untested recipes and decided to solve this problem with a tool that only generates untested recipes? You're happier to cook or bake something from a wall of text that wasn't authored by anyone with any amount of culinary experience, that nobody has ever read before, attempted to replicate, or publicly critiqued, why?

I don't buy it, that's going to be a strictly worse experience than trying out the first search result that has photos, is rated 4/5 stars or better and that has a few positive comments. You can always ask an LLM for substitution recommendations separately.

Yup. SEO slop is generally worse than AI generated, unfortunately

What do you think the AI was trained on?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com