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From selecting the dishes to catering to the specific tastes of the guests and, of course, the possibility of disaster in the kitchen, hosting a dinner party is a stressful affair.
What if, instead of spending hours sifting through cookbooks, you could type in a few simple prompts and, with the magic of generative AI, create an entire suite of menu items under a specific innovative theme?
Sean Linehan, CEO of San Francisco business coaching startup Exec, tried just that when he played an AI-generated message dinner on the weekend with “surprisingly delicious” results.
He asked ChatGPT, a hot new tool created by OpenAI, to come up with a list of unique fusion themes and settled on an Indo-Mediterranean with input from guests, who were both culinary adventurous and sufficiently experienced in turning potentially rough recipes into tasty dishes. .
“Most of my friends thought what it would turn out would be inconsistent and disgusting. They assumed it wouldn’t work,” Linehan said in an interview. was disgusting, it would still be funny.
“Even my fiancée was kind of like, ‘I’m going to do this because you want to,'” Linehan said with a laugh.
Some of the skepticism was justified. A Japanese-Italian idea, for example, was rejected due to the limited appeal of a sushi-pizza hybrid.
The menu was refined further with guests targeting it towards a sophisticated San Francisco palate and dietary restrictions for its eight guests. For each item, he asked ChatGPT to generate a list of ingredients, cooking times, serving sizes, and instructions. Then he sent the homework to his friends.
The result washing up included saffron rice with toasted almonds and currants, spicy chaat masala hummus, grilled portobello mushrooms with raita and mint chutney, and a cardamom-saffron pistachio baklava that was a particular hit.
Almost every dish was tweaked by the various chefs, Linehan said. And there were a few hiccups: for example, a masala recipe that included the spice blend itself as an ingredient, and a whitefish stew that called for triple the amount of spice called for by the recipe.
“Once everyone showed up, there was a collective sigh of relief. I think everyone was a little nervous about sitting down and having an awful meal,” Linehan said. “At the end of the party, everyone was very pleasantly surprised and said they would do it again.”
Linehan said he’s been using OpenAI’s technology for years and has integrated generative AI into his own company’s software platform. But the crossover with her culinary interest first happened when, out of curiosity, Linehan asked the platform to develop a recipe for a dish called “The Ultimate Serotonin Boost” and explain why she had selected the ingredients she wanted. she had chosen.
To his surprise, what emerged was a superfood-laden quinoa salad that ticked all the boxes for what he was looking for.
At times, much to his fiancée’s chagrin, Linehan has begun to incorporate the use of ChatGPT into regular weekday meals, asking the platform to offer recipes based on what’s left in the fridge.
Reactions on social media to his AI-generated party were split between excitement and interest and exaggerated concerns about humanity delegating surveillance of taste and experiences to machines.
Sprinkled over dinner was a fair share of AI lord jokes, but Roko’s basilisk references aside, Linehan’s takeaways are that these tools can be very powerful and also simply fun.
“Anyone who treats this as some sort of fatalistic abdication of human responsibility is missing the point,” Linehan said. “The thing is, we all enjoyed ourselves with an incredible amount of very delicious food.”
But he couldn’t resist including a little joke about the upcoming robot takeover.
“Hey, if we’re going to be overwhelmed, let’s at least make it enjoyable,” Linehan said.
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