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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I love to cook! I also use AI to brainstorm recipes sometimes! Wanna try asking Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or even Grok what temperature chicken needs to be cooked to? I just asked Claude: 165°F (74°C) internal temperature.

Where does this come from?

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if you ask that question alone, AI is most likely to get it right, but the usual pitfalls of AI apply; they sometimes randomly get things wrong, people are more likely to miss wrong information when it's surrounded with correct information, and LLMs are specifically good at making text that seems correct on the surface. and in my experience, people often use AI specifically because they don't have a lot of knowledge in an area. if you do already know plenty about cooking, I'm sure using AI is probably fine, I just see it as a red flag.

cooking is also a form of art, with a strong social aspect. using AI for it has a similar ick factor to using generative AI for pictures. I'm not saying I immediately distrust anyone using it, but I do think it's a sign that maybe the person cares a bit less about what they're doing.

Arguably, that's wrong - not because it's unsafe, but because it's not the best temperature for any part of the chicken I know of. I'm a big J. Kenji López-Alt and Serious Eats fan, and 165 is too hot for good chicken breast and too cool for good dark meat: https://www.seriouseats.com/chicken-thigh-temperature-techni...

That's such pointless evidence.

Let's see what gemini says in response to a more realistic prompt: https://gemini.google.com/share/f0bcbe46c337

Well, look at that. 1.5 lbs of chicken breast in the oven @425 for 10 minutes, and a minute or two of broiling should do the trick.

Unlike all human-written recipes I found, it doesn't give the temperature to cook it to.

I can't tell if you're criticizing the parent or are innocently asking how Claude knows the temperature for chicken.

To be clear in the case of the former: Harm data points have approximately one trillion times the weight of no-harm data points, as a rule of thumb.

Even if it can give the right answer when asked, will it necessarily account for that in a recipe it generates? A beginning cook may not know enough to ask.

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