Google Arts & Culture is the search giant's hub for high resolution scans of art and cultural artifacts sourced from museums and archives around the world. Like the rest of the company, the high-minded platform isn't above experimenting with AI, and has launched a new tool that seeks to generate a fusion recipe mixing two different types of cuisines.
Why you'd want AI to generate an untested combination of, say, Mexican and Chinese dishes instead of seeking out a recipe from an actual human chef who has the ability to taste food is anyone's guess, but for the curious, the Food Mood tool is here to show you what a bot thinks you should cook for dinner.
Food Mood is a Google AI experiment created by artists at Google Arts & Culture Lab. It's billed as a playful fusion recipe generator that can combine elements from two different cuisines and generate a new dish. (Yes, I double-checked, and this isn't the company's annual April Fool's Day prank.)
What real chefs learn to do via years of education, inspiration, and sweating and swearing in the kitchen, Food Mood handles through the power of generative AI. The experiment, created by artists Emmanuel Durgoni and Gaël Hugo, uses Google's Gemini 1.0 Pro via Vertex AI.
The online tool is simple to use, and pretty intuitive. Tell the AI the type of dish you are looking for (a starter, a main, or a soup), how many people you want to serve, and which types of cuisine you'd like to mix (from two columns of choices offered—the list of countries is pretty extensive).
Click the Let's Cook button to generate the recipe (though you can generate random recipes too).
I tested it out by choosing a starter for two people, mixing influences from South Korea and India. (In my testing, the resultant recipes aren't too elaborate, and should be feasible for you to cooka t home.)
Food Mood gives you a few options to customize your recipe. Click the slider icon on the main page to reveal modifiers and tell the AI if, for instance, if you prefer a vegan, vegetarian, or gluten-free meal. You can also add your own list of ingredients—there's an auto-suggest menu that lets you pick up to three.
Whether or not the final result is a recipe for something you'd actually want to eat, the recipe page is a remarkable showcase of Google's advancing AI capabilities. It creates a neat layout with a hip name, step-by-step instructions, cooking time, and pro tips on one side. There's even an AI-generated photo of what the dish will (?) look like.
Do note the disclaimer that comes with each recipe:
This experiment uses AI to inspire your creativity in the kitchen. Recipes have not been developed in kitchens or by chefs. Please use your best judgment, and always prioritize food safety.
Everyone has relied on the internet to search for recipes, and sites like AllRecipes and FoodCombo, already gave you the ability to search for recipes combining ingredients you have on hand. Food Mood just goes one step beyond by inventing the recipe for you if it doesn't exist (and with the caveat that it might not actually taste good). Realistically, it's not a challenge to trained chefs, and at least you'll go into the process knowing you're asking an AI to cook for you. That's preferable to buying a cookbook you didn't realize was AI-generated.
