‘AI LIES,’ ACCORDING TO CHEF/FUTURIST IAN RAMIREZ, AS HE DEMONSTRATED THE PROGRESS—AND PITFALLS —OF USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO WRITE MENUS AT FSD’S RECENT MENU DIRECTIONS CONFERENCE. BY TARA FITZPATRICK AI CAN HELP CHEFS IN THE KITCHEN, BUT YOU HAD BETTER DOUBLE-CHECK ITS WORK MENU POWERED BY
this. Another big one is, you don’t know if what you’re using may be someone else’s intellectual property. There are so many unknowns right now, and that’s why corporate America doesn’t want you using it.” Many of us, as consumers, are using AI in some form or another, without even realizing it, Ramirez said, citing online ordering, optimizing food de- livery times and drive-thru technology. “My wife is in marketing, and she gave me an example: If you pick a shade of lipstick from Sephora, it can give you a matching dress from another site,” he said. For chefs and managers, AI is al- ready helping with things like invento- ry, procurement and streamlining busi- ness through workflow tracking, such as measuring the steps employees are taking in a kitchen throughout the day to determine wasted steps. “It’s pretty interesting and really great, but how invasive is that and how comfortable we feel with that, I don’t know,” Ramirez said. “But monitoring a kitchen is something we all do. How many steps are being taken, how do we shorten this and how do we make this easier for people?” He pointed out another way to use AI is plugging in screenshots of com- plex math equations and charts with the prompt, “Put this in layman’s terms for me.” As far as robot chefs doing the ac- tual cooking, Ramirez predicts, “I don’t think they’ll ever completely re- place us, but they’re getting better and more effective.” Planning several-week cycles is a keystone of onsite chefs’ work, and Ramirez has been tinkering with AI
C hef Ian Ramirez, founder of Mad Honey Culinary Studio, is known for his creativity on the plate as a college chef in the past and lately with his own com- pany. For a few years now, he’s been experimenting with how artificial in- telligence (AI) might be able to boost human intelligence (HI) when working on recipes, menu cycles and more. “A lot of people have been making fun of AI in the past year,” Ramirez said during his appearance at the Menu Directions conference, presented by Foodservice Director, showing exam- ples of the weird, uncanny fingers AI can conjure, and its reaction to the prompt “salmon jumping in a river,” which showed fully cooked salmon fil- lets cheerfully swimming upstream. Another prompt, “How many rocks should I eat?” led to AI’s recommenda- tion of “everyone should eat one small rock per day.” Or, when asking AI for advice on helping cheese stick to a piz- za, the answer was “non-toxic glue.” In another example, AI said that cooking spaghetti sauce with gasoline will make it extra spicy. Wow. While there’s no doubt some silli- ness has occurred, but jokes aside, for lots of fields, professionals are ask- ing themselves how they will co-exist with AI as it gets smarter and learns more by the day. Many human profes- sionals are feeling a bit uneasy, and that’s understandable. “There’s a big corporate resistance to AI adoption and there’s reasons for that,” Ramirez said. “Data security is one of those reasons. That’s why your corporation may not want you using
to help with that often laborious and time-consuming process. “This is a pain point I’ve always had as a chef and it takes a lot of time,” he said, showing an image of a room with wall-to-wall sticky notes to build a five- week menu cycle. “What we were try- ing to do is create a nice menu mix of those items. We had to re-do it over and over.” So Ramirez’s next questions were: “How does AI augment our potential? How does AI augment our HI?” Fine-tuning prompts that will get effective AI responses is human’s work and it’s not always easy, he found. “With AI, we engineered hundreds of prompts over and over again. The sys- tem kept breaking. We said, ‘I want a five-week menu cycle for six stations in a Midwest college town. I put all these
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