The evolution of AI has grown exponentially in recent years, but its influence on the culinary world has been closely monitored.
AI has many uses and applications, from optimising operations to streamlining service. But when it comes to creativity, there are questions around where chefs stand.
Some chefs have embraced it, some think their colleagues should be using it more, and many others have major reservations, from ethics to environmental concerns.
AI tools are making their way into the industry in a range of different ways. It’s not a matter of if or when. The question now is how to use it, and how it serves as a tool to tell an authentic story.
AI systems are built from what already exists, from human creativity and experience. They don’t have imagination and are not always accurate. But AI language models do have a tremendous amount of data to pull from.
Companies like OpenAI, Apple, Anthropic, Mistral, Google, and Meta “train” their generative-AI chatbots from internet resources, movies, TV, books, academic papers, and articles, saying “fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this.” However, recent reporting indicated that AI tools have pirated millions of books and research papers to train the large language models that feed generative bots. Run a keyword search for any chef who has published a cookbook, and it is likely to be there.
Studies have found that, on average, 45 percent of text generated by ChatGPT is plagiarism. Beyond intellectual property issues, things just start to sound the same, with a homogenisation of the way chatbots write for a user. More and more people are familiar with “ChatGPT voice,” which, in a way, is comforting to know that humans can still recognise AI-generated text. But that’s also because more and more people are relying on these platforms to do creative work for them.
People can create compelling art with AI, and chefs are certainly using it in new and interesting ways. But there is danger in it being so widespread.
Indeed, harnessing AI is an evolving fascination for the industry. From apps for procurement to image generators churning out whatever is typed in, these technologies continue creeping into nearly every digital tool there is, at an accelerating pace. Sometimes it’s too difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not. So there is a real challenge when it comes to drawing a line in the sand for chefs.
If AI is going to be a real tool in the service of creativity, it needs transparency and a genuine effort against complacency. Just as with references on written work or artistic inspiration, chefs need to negotiate for themselves how they want to use AI in their creative process, and then be ready to own up to it.
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