The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted people who are chronically online. The adventure of finding random blogs that agree with my wild opinions or to simply surf the internet for anything has been reduced to searching “ChatGPT” in my web browser. Sure, this way the users’ needs are met instantly and you have your answers within seconds. But it’s not as fun. I sometimes enjoy reading a blogger’s background of how their opinion or recipe came to be.
For Valentine’s Day, I decided to make red velvet truffles, and in doing so, put AI to the test. I used a recipe from My Heavenly Recipes. I scrolled through the commentary and smiled to myself from the surplus of photos and sweet captions. I felt at home and comforted while I was reading, it contributed to the whole relaxing aura of baking.
After seeing this recipe, I moved on to searching for ChatGPT. I was welcomed with their typical dark screen and plea for entering a prompt. After asking, they quickly answered with a long description of how to make the recipe and a surplus of ingredients.
The recipes weren’t too different. ChatGPT had more elaborate ingredients like a fancier, more expensive chocolate. This had me searching high and low in the grocery store aisles for certain ingredients. Comparatively, I could find almost all of the blog recipe’s ingredients in my pantry, except for candy melts and red velvet cake mix. This made the recipe easier to make, less of a process and saved me some money and time.
In the end, I enjoyed both. The people I shared these with really could not tell the difference between recipes. It is known that AI uses internet data so clearly the computer would have gone off of what was already online. Since AI had a more complex recipe, I was surprised that they did not taste as rich compared to the homemade recipe. Overall, if I was feeling lazy and had no love in my heart for Valentine’s Day, maybe I would go to ChatGPT and find something generated easily, but it would never be my first choice. I would much rather scroll through recipes crafted from history and made with love from their creators.
