An AI generated recipe Vs A Food Blogger's recipe
The teen members of the club, analyzed recipes for South Indian Vegetable Curry generated by ChatGPT and Nigella Lawson's version. Here is what they found...
Nigella Lawson, an English food writer and television cook, created this amazing recipe for South Indian Vegetable Curry with coconut milk. A recipe that comes in handy especially when you have small quantities of vegetables that are not enough to form a dish of their own. Although olive oil might be an odd ingredient in a curry that is called South Indian, the rest of the ingredients are typically available in a South Indian kitchen. But for baby corn which isn’t exactly traditionally South Indian and came into South Indian cuisine much later. Nevertheless, the recipe is worth a try and something different from the usual.
An Experiment
Previously on the Young Writers’ Club, the teens had analyzed the recent news that smart phones such as iOS 18 have an AI assistant feature that can create custom recipes based on what ingredients are available at home. They had discussed the convenience aspects as well as the dangers involved. Preferences seemed to lean towards tested recipes rather than try something that is AI generated. “Are these recipes any good? Was the result tasty?” These were questions that remained unanswered.
Tamarind and Lemon together
Curious to know more, we took up this recipe of Nigella Lawson. We individually gave Chat GPT commands to create a recipe using exactly the same ingredients. Interestingly all of us came up with different results, not even one that was close to Nigella Lawson’s recipe. One teen even found that the recipe generated asked him to use both tamarind and lemon, which is uh, a little too much of tanginess combined! An amateur cook could completely ruin his or her meal!
While that was an aberration, our experiments with the tool indicated that we could fine tune it and even use features such as inbuilt memory that recorded likes and dislikes.
What’s more the AI generated recipe highlighted the important steps in bold making it easy to follow. But Nigella Lawson’ recipe was far more useful as she gives useful tips both related to the recipe as well as general tips that could particularly be useful. For eg. a user’s tip for handling turmeric stains posted on her website. AI did not offer that additional feature which could prove to be very useful.
Writing styles
That didn’t really seem to matter as all versions used easy to follow language, clearly explaining each step as we went along.
In sum, the general consensus continued to be the same. If one had to try cooking this curry, one would rather pick Nigella Lawson’s recipe or any other food blogger’s recipe instead of an AI generated recipe. “Too much work, too much of back and forth, fine tuning the recipe to meet our requirements. A time tested recipe written by a human being is definitely going to be faster and tastier!”