> ...some of my favourites like Smitten Kitchen and Meera Sodha because I know they’re going to be excellent. I trust that the recipe is tried and tested, and the result will be delicious. ChatGPT will give you an approximation of a recipe made up from the average of lots of recipes, but they lack the personality of each individual recipe, which will be slightly different to reflect the experiences and tastes of the author.

It's funny, I want the ChatGPT "approximation". As someone who does a lot of cooking, when I want to learn a new dish, the last thing I want is the "personality" and "tastes" of some author, which is generally expressed by including bizarre ingredient choices, or bizarrely low or high levels of fat, sugar, and salt.

I used to have to read through 15 different "idiosyncratic" versions of a recipe because every single blogger seems to want to put their own "twist" on a recipe, and then I had to figure out the commonalities across them, and then make that. It took forever.

Now I can just ask ChatGPT and get something like the "Platonic ideal" of a particular recipe, which is great to start with. And then I can ask it for suggestions of variations, which will generally be well-chosen and "standard" as opposed to idiosyncratic "individuality".

Because let's face it: individuality is great in art, whether it's fiction or music. I love individuality there. But not in everyday cooking. Usually, you just want a fairly standard version of something that tastes good. Obviously if you go to high-end dining you're looking for something more like individual art. But not for regular recipes to make at home, usually.

You’ve captured an elusive sentiment so well! AI is (often, not always) good at generating the “Platonic ideal” of something. It falls apart ime when you’re confronting a specific problem that requires more nuance.

Character/personality in a creative work imo comes largely from an element of surprise. If there’s nothing counterintuitive about a work, it’s not very memorable/enticing. Maybe that’s why AI art/text feels so bland. The Platonic ideal is bland. But also, if you’re looking for function rather than art, AI can dish it out.

Maybe you're just using the wrong sources? I guess it's possible that websites don't exist for that, although I somehow doubt it. When I want the basic version of a traditional recipe, I use a cook book. Like the one I still have from high school cooking class. No experiments or fancy additions, just the basic stuff clearly put together.

There are still a lot of advantages for such a source compared to an LLM average. Cue all the many usual reasons why an LLM response might not be what you were looking for, even if you don't notice it.

> when I want to learn a new dish, the last thing I want is the "personality" and "tastes" of some author

Bro what do you think cooking is? Every dish is a generalized description of peoples personal ways of making that thing passed down through generations. There is no single authoritative way of doing it.

There is no such as a "platonic ideal" of a recipe. Picking the "most average" recipe is just as arbitrary as a random one.