AI Recipe Ideas: An Experiment

Can algorithms spark human creativity?

18 December 2020
Joel Christiansen
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Mixing artificial intelligence and creativity has always felt off-putting to me. Probably because creativity is a human thing and AI is, by definition, artificial.

Yet I and many others wonder: What if AI could help us be more creative? More specifically, what if AI empowered us to do more creative things that are still fundamentally human?

Out of curiosity, I whipped up the following experiment using a creative discipline that feels particularly human: cooking.1

On the next page, you'll see a list of 12 recipe ideas. Not full ingredient lists or directions, just ideas for dishes.

Some of these ideas are from humans, either professional chefs or me (not professional). The remainder come from natural language AI that I fed real recipes from hardcopy cookbooks.

Try to guess which recipe ideas came from a human and which came from AI. After you guess, you'll see how you did and how that compares to average guesses.

Show me the recipes >
P.S. This is completely anonymous and just for fun. I won't hit you up for an email address or anything else. The only data I gather are: (1) your answers, and (2) when you started and ended the experiment. If you don't want to try guessing (boo!) or you're a returning visitor, you can skip to the answers here.
Thanks to Steven Ovadia, Ryan Williams, Drew Stegmaier, Michael Shafer and Compound Writing for reviewing a draft of this experiment.
1 To read more about how I chose food/AI and created this experiment, click here.