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Comment by tornato7 | Hacker News Reader

I get all of my recipes from GPT-4 these days. Granted, most of them are just regurgitating a common recipe, but I find that it's able to tweak recipes appropriately if I say "I'm out of X, can I use Y or Z instead?" - I've never actually had a bad recipe come of it.

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Yeah I've found GPT-4 to be surprisingly good at recipes. I think that's because it's effectively serving up the "average" recipe for anything you ask it for, based on everything it's scraped from the internet... which usually ends up being a good recipe.

I love being able to challenge it with "and now make it vegan" etc to see what it comes up with.

This is also another example of the thing where having a randomly unreliable teacher is actually quite useful if you're trying to learn to cook - because it forces you to question what it tells you, apply your own intuition and think carefully about what worked and what didn't.

If you think about how it works, it's going to have a strong representation of oft-published recipes and oft-published substitutions and will be able to mash those together into plausible original recipes that are adjacent to them. Making a satisfying meal for a few people with comparatively mainstream tastes should be pretty reliable.

But the more esoteric you go, aiming for something really novel or something unusually historic/traditional/regional, or the more technical and delicate, the more it'll turn to hallucinating naive text continuations that will lead you astray. An experienced cook will know to spot the weird stuff and revise on the fly; an inexperienced one is going to end up with some... odd dishes.

It's the same as many of us see when used for code assistance. It's great at inventing "original" boilerplate which inspiration has been exhaustively covered in source material, but gets real wacky and unreliable the more you move away from that.

I mean if you can cook already you can do whatever you want. I could make a decent meal from a recipe in a language I don't speak just off a handful of cognates. Doesn't mean I followed the recipe in a meaningful sense.

When I've looked at gpt recipes they've had some pretty deranged proportions and you'd be in trouble following them precisely. If you just need a list of ingredients and a loose technique though eg "tofu & cashew stir fry with soy sauce and garlic" then ya sure I mean absolutely.

post a picture of your dinner

"steak frites lasagna with cream base and avocado mash tartare"

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