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Comment by cush | Hacker News Reader

> Feels like I'm being condescended to and treated like a child

Curious why that feels condescending? Like, the average person who is seeking a recipe needs a photo to know what to shoot for

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> Like, the average person who is seeking a recipe needs a photo to know what to shoot for

The menu: Rosemary and garlic roast lamb, Extra-crispy roast potatoes, Honey-roasted carrots and parsnips, broccoli.

The photo: [1] Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, baby carrots, broccoli, brussels sprouts. No lamb, no parsnips.

If you shoot for what's in the photo, you're going to have a bad time.

You're also going to have a bad time when you try to make an apple crumble with no flour, no sugar, and no butter, because they're not on the shopping list.

[1] https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/gyzrX8zp3O2KLEPm0FAqh...

I've heard of other people for years now trusting AI for recipes, and it's a rare area that I simply can't bring myself to take seriously.

I feel like it can only be successful by luck. Either it's reproducing a recipe verbatim that was tried and validated and tasted by a human, in which case, we didn't need AI for that, just a searchable cookbook. Or, it's making one up. I understand that using RLHF has helped improve the quality of questions about history, programming, or TV show recommendations, but I do not believe that there has been some kind of training regime where people prompt the models for "a recipe that uses X, Y, Z random ingredients," follow the recipe, and then score it. And even if they do, I don't see how a model can learn enough from that besides "this exact recipe is good/bad." '1/2 tsp cumin' may be a great addition to one recipe and not enough for another, so improving the output based on a bunch of scored recipes... I just don't believe cooking is an LLM job.

Maybe some other kind of model that I don't know about.

I've had some really good experiences with cocktail recipes and Claude. It's got access to my barcart inventory, general tastes, and general desired level of effort.

I feel like the technique recommendations are probably the most valuable element, but I'm getting rave reviews like 85% of the time now?

There have been a couple times where I was out of an ingredient and it proposed an adjustment that sounded a little wild to me, but it almost always is well received.

You're right, we don't need AI for that, we need a searchable cookbook.

Unfortunately, one does not exist.

The Internet, however, is full of garbage cooking advice, and while AI is quite happy to parrot that garbage, it's not significantly worse than it's sources.

What, you've never owned a cookbook?

The physical ones have indices, and the digital ones usually do as well (plus string search).

I own multiple physical cookbooks.

I often find their contents to be both incredibly broad, and incredibly shallow, and often lead to dishes that don't quite suit my tastes.

I have generally had more success with the internet than I have with them.

I have the same problem with cookbooks

I usually just find recipes that are close to something I like and then modify them until I like them

I feel like cooking recipes should always be full of little notes from past attempts, to tweak them to your personal taste

I do that, but I've found more success with using internet recipes as a starting point. The general-purpose cookbooks are, at best, another data point, or an explanation for something glossed over by other recipes. Ar worst, they kind of suck.

And we aren't talking about something esoteric. How To Cook Everything. (4.5 rating on Amazon, 4.0 on Goodreads), one of the most popular cookbooks in the world...

Has its first recipe for chicken cutlets produce undercooked chicken (15 minutes at 325F has not resulted in 165F internally).

Worse yet, its chile recipe for some weird reason involves boiling and simmering a whole onion with the beans before throwing it out (WTF). It then has you drain the beans only to add that drained water right back (WTF?), unless you optionally replace it with tap water (WTF was the point of boiling the onion then?), so that you could bring them to boil again. The recipe barely has any spice besides actual chile peppers.

This... Is not good or helpful, but is incredibly opinionated with a bunch of bullshit steps. Like, yes, I could tweak that into something that's not insane, but why would I choose that as a starting point..?

I get it. Compiling a thousand-page cookbook is really hard. But this... Ain't great.

Once again, Grandma had it right. The Fanny Farmer or Betty Crocker cookbook with dozens of little papers slipped in it and/or marginal notes everywhere is the way.

I wanted to correct you and bring up my favorite website that had filters for the ingredients you want/don't want to use, type of dish, and time for cooking, but it appears that in a last month it was sold and now it links to the slop site with no useful filtering. I used this site as a quick lookup for recipe ideas for 7 years now.

Fuck. Does nothing good survive on the internet anymore.

If you’re already very experienced at cooking AI recipes are amazing. They cut to the chase and provide a good enough outline without all the preamble

Same here, I’ve been cooking for myself and later also my wife since 2005, even when baking I rarely need exact amounts, for cooking I essentially never follow the recipe directly and adapt them as needed, without ever changing them from the original.

I mostly don’t even need a recipe from AI, just the title and a 1-2 sentence description.

In case you or anyone else in this thread hasn't come across it, https://www.recipesource.com/ is basically the same but curated.

I was going to ask why it’s not the first result in Google but the expired cert and invalid CN explains it.

LLMs for recipes are good if you just want to make a thing, not necessarily the best version of that thing. It's nice being able to ask questions about certain steps as well, or ingredient substitutions if needed. It'll make a nice, average, recipe (unless I suppose you prompt for something). That's perfectly fine for most cooking, and often what you want when you're making a dish for the first time.

It also doesn't really like tell you how to actually cook anything. Good or even just decent recipes tend to tell you the temperatures, times, techniques and orders of ingredients to do things for the best results. Unless I'm missing it this is just really broad strokes. But I guess the goal in engagement so they want you to ask a lot more questions to actually figure anything out.

Holy shit. I read this on mobile so didn’t actually see the recipe part because you have to scroll way down to see it. It is awful! The shopping list makes no sense and the recipe instructions literally have an “Everything else” item. Yikes…

For me, the text-only recipes I already get out of ChatGPT today are good enough

Mind you, this is OpenAI's cherry-picked example

More like prune-picked !

With an image of sour grapes

You’ve illustrated something about use of AI that really bothers me. The lack of discernment by its users. Sure, the pictures and diagrams are impressive, but did you actually read and evaluate the output?

The first thing the user sees should directly answer the question they asked. Not a different question. They didn’t ask what a roast looks like.

The user is probably in a grocery store. They need to buy the stuff first. Showing them a picture of a finished product is an irrelevant distraction.

Then, if there is some arguably relevant content you can tack it on afterwards.

> The user is probably in a grocery store.

“My made up scenario is definitely more realistic than your made up scenario.”

Who goes shopping for the meal before they even have a number of guests?

What do meals and guests have anything to do with each other?

In human societies it’s usually considered polite to size the meals so that all guests can have food.

Genuine question - do they? Unless it's something like a fancy cake then instructions should really tell you everything about stacking. Half the recipes are mixed anyway (curry, stir fry, stews, ...), lots of other are either stacked or separated on the plate. So apart from the really exceptional stuff, to people really need to know "what you shoot for"?

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