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but they’re getting better and more effective.'” “
As far as robot chefs doing the actual cooking, Ramirez predicts, 'I don’t think they’ll ever completely replace us,
subtle signals and cues our human sub- conscious can pick up on. One success story is the fast-casu- al chain Velvet Taco, which used AI to use existing pantry items to create five unique taco builds, which worked well. “They call it ‘The AI Taco,’ and it’s been a pretty neat marketing plan,” Ramirez said. Overall, AI is something chefs should continue playing with in differ- ent ways. “What AI first started com- ing about, it was one of those things, where, I’m a chef and I have a creative process,” he said. “I thought creative jobs are safe. We’re safe. It’ll just be things for doctors and lawyers, more technical. But it’s now creating all this beautiful stuff and we never saw it com- ing. It’s scary.”
guardrails in place and it would just break. So, we had to play around with that. We kind of landed on taking small bites, creating prompts for one station, one week at a time.” And humans must still keep a watch on AI when planning menus in this way. For example, on a menu for a Mexican concept, AI came up with “Taco Thurs- day,” rather than “Taco Tuesday.” For the same concept, Ramirez prompted for entrees, but black bean soup and queso fundido appeared, which are more of side dishes or starters. The same goes for recipes. An ex- ample Ramirez found when he asked AI to modify a recipe into a low-sodium version, AI simply said, “Use less salt.” Basically, when creating recipes us- ing AI, “you have to double-check be-
cause AI lies,” Ramirez said. When it comes to nutritional and allergen information, an even closer watch is required for AI. “You can ask it to provide that information, but of- ten AI is very wrong,” Ramirez said. “You and also use it to generate images for menu items, but these images are pulled from thousands of photos from the Internet, sometimes a combination of thousands of people’s recipes and photos, and they’re ok, but they’re ob- viously fake.” Ramirez shared his screen, and with a suggestion from the audience, looked for paella recipes and photos. At first, the photos looked good, but slightly “off,” something of an “uncanny val- ley” situation, where it’s close to the real thing, but unnerving because of
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PHOTO COURTESY OF W. SCOTT MITCHELL PHOTOGRAPHY
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