Google Arts & Culture is the search giant's hub for high-resolution scans of art and cultural artifacts from museums and archives around the world. Like the rest of the company, the high-profile platform isn't shy about experimenting with artificial intelligence and has launched a new tool designed to generate fusion recipes that mix two different types of cuisine.
Why you'd want an AI to generate untested combinations of Mexican and Chinese dishes instead of finding recipes from real human chefs with the ability to taste the food is anyone's guess, but for the curious, Food Sentiment The tool is here to show you what the bot thinks you should make for dinner.
Food Mood mixes recipes from two different styles of cuisine
Food Mood is a Google AI experiment created by artists in the Google Arts & Culture Lab. It's billed as a fun fusion recipe generator that combines elements of two different cuisines and generates a new dish. (Yes, I double checked, this isn't the company's annual April Fools' Day prank.)
What real chefs learn to do through years of education, inspiration, and sweat and swearing in the kitchen, Food Mood handles it with the power of generative artificial intelligence. The experiment was created by artists Emmanuel Durgoni and Gaël Hugo using Google's Gemini 1.0 Pro via Vertex AI.
This online tool is easy to use and very intuitive. Tell the AI what type of dish you are looking for (appetizer, main course or soup), how many people you want to serve and what type of dishes you want to mix (choose from the two columns provided - the list of countries is quite extensive) .
Click the "Let's Cook" button to generate a recipe (although you can also generate a random recipe).
I tested it by choosing an appetizer for two people, a mix of Korean and Indian influences. (In my testing, the final recipe wasn't overly complicated and should allow you to cook it at home.)
Food Mood gives you some options for customizing your recipes. Clicking the slider icon on the homepage reveals modifiers and tells the AI, for example, whether you prefer vegan, vegetarian or gluten-free meals. You can also add your own ingredient list - there's an auto-suggestion menu that lets you choose up to three.
Regardless of whether the end result is a recipe you actually want to eat, the recipe page is a great showcase for Google's advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. It creates a neat layout with funky names, step-by-step instructions, cooking times, and pro tips on one side. There's even an AI-generated photo of what the dish(?) looks like.
Please note the disclaimer that comes with each recipe:
This experiment uses artificial intelligence to inspire your creativity in the kitchen. Recipes are not developed by the kitchen or chef. Please use your best judgment and always put food safety first.
Artificial intelligence recipes have emerged
Everyone relies on the internet to search for recipes, and sites like AllRecipes and FoodCombo already allow you to search for recipes that incorporate ingredients you have on hand. Food Mood goes a step further and invents recipes for you if they don't exist (but be warned, it might not actually taste good). In reality, this isn't much of a challenge for a trained chef, at least you go into the process knowing you're asking an AI to cook for you. It’s better than buying a cookbook that you didn’t realize was generated by artificial intelligence.
