Exploring the Benefits and Drawbacks of NonHuman-Based Creativity for Coding and the Marketing

One of the reasons I moved back to North Carolina was to focus on developing my family motel where I grew up into a destination. My wife and I are very fond of the retro-motel travel trend and here we had the opportunity to do one ourselves. So we bought the place at the end of 2017 and started renovations while still keeping it operational. It has been an adventure.?

Well fast forward to the end of 2022. We have been developing the infrastructure for a new restaurant for a year (HomeCraft) and were close to completion when a chef fell into our lap. He was staying at the motel and his job in the area disappeared. So we hired him and he created a great menu based upon our concepts and recollections of Smoky Mountain heritage food combined with the spices and traditions of my wife's country of origin Trinidad & Tobago.?

We got great reviews and things started great... but then the chef just left and never came back. Total scramble. Luckily we had great line cooks and the general manager of the motel had ran restaurants before. So we survived and thrived. We can get Guests Chef's occasionally (thanks Jennifer Cole) and we will eventually find the right chef again. But in the meantime, myself, my wife, and the general manager have been using our creativity and knowledge of cultures to expand on the original great menu to create specials and new dishes. Very successfully executed by our talented young cooks.?

Because of this, I have been experimenting with ChatGPT to see if it could actually create new recipes. One of the first queries and results were:

Query:

What Trinidadian spice or ingredient would you add to a bacon, cheese, and ramp quiche

The Result?

One Trinidadian spice that would go well with bacon, cheese, and ramp quiche is pimento, also known as allspice. Pimento is a key ingredient in many Trinidadian dishes, and its warm, slightly sweet, and slightly spicy flavor would complement the smoky saltiness of the bacon, the rich creaminess of the cheese, and the oniony flavor of the ramps. You could add a pinch of ground pimento to the egg mixture before baking the quiche, or you could sprinkle some whole pimento berries on top of the quiche as a garnish. Another option could be to add some Trinidadian hot pepper sauce, such as scotch bonnet pepper sauce, to the quiche for some extra heat and flavor.

Guess what? We made that quiche and it was absolutely delicious and is on the menu!?So I started searching for more ideas. First I went further down the Caribbean quiche route:

Query:

Suggest a Caribbean inspire quiche recipe that would benefit from mountain foraged ramps

Result:

Certainly! How about a Caribbean-inspired quiche with sweet plantains, black beans, and mountain foraged ramps? Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 refrigerated pie crust

2 ripe sweet plantains, peeled and sliced into rounds

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 can black beans, drained and rinsed

1/4 cup chopped mountain foraged ramps

4 eggs

1 cup half-and-half

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 cup shredded pepper jack cheese

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C).

In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and garlic, and cook until the onion is softened, about 5 minutes.

Add the sweet plantains and cook until golden brown, about 3-4 minutes per side.

Remove from heat and let cool.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, half-and-half, salt, black pepper, and ground cumin.

Place the pie crust in a 9-inch pie dish. Prick the bottom with a fork.

Spread the black beans over the pie crust. Arrange the sweet plantains on top of the black beans. Sprinkle with chopped mountain foraged ramps.

Pour the egg mixture over the top of the sweet plantains and black beans.

Sprinkle shredded pepper jack cheese on top of the quiche.

Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the quiche is set and the top is golden brown.

Remove from oven and let cool for 10 minutes before slicing and serving.

The mountain foraged ramps add a delicious garlicky flavor to this Caribbean-inspired quiche, which is already packed with flavor from the sweet plantains, black beans, and pepper jack cheese. Enjoy!

I was blown away - I looked and looked - this recipe or even the combinations of ingredients do not exist anywhere on the Internet that I can find. We haven't tested it yet - but Direct Message me and I will let you know how it turns out!

So I did start wondering "Did ChatGPT just create something new?"?Of course I turned to the horse to see what would come out of its mouth.?

Query:

Can ChatGPT create new recipes that have never existed?

Result:

Yes, as an AI language model, I can certainly generate new recipe ideas and combinations that have never existed before based on my understanding of ingredients, cooking techniques, and flavor profiles. However, it's important to note that while I can generate new ideas, it's up to humans to evaluate whether these recipes would be tasty, practical, and safe to prepare and consume. Additionally, recipes are often influenced by cultural and regional food traditions, so creating a truly original recipe that hasn't been influenced by any existing culinary tradition would be a rare occurrence. Nonetheless, I can certainly provide unique and creative recipe ideas that may inspire new culinary creations.

So, I wonder, is creativity just an iteration of many possibilities and using knowledge to surmise what might work? It is possible I think that we all just seek the "new" in combinations not done before and call it creativity... however, unlike many of us humans, ChatGPT is brutally honest - it does not have the discernment (or perhaps just the body) to determine if something is good or not. It produces useless creativity until there is the ability to judge quality. Which requires (right now) a human being.

I have had to work hard to learn this lesson in my professional life. As a coder and content producer for business and marketing, I have the ability to be prodigiously productive in producing massive iterations of code and content.?But much of it is mundane, not producing particularly productive results. It took me a long time realize the benefits of the boring stuff - the measuring, the analysis, the quality control, the testing, the numerous other details that go into successful marketing campaigns and working software. And even then, with a functional and useful solution, it still takes the discernment of humans, the customers to tell me if the results are tasty.?

I guess I have elevated human discernment to an exalted space, but I do want to show respect, of a sort, to the AI that started this article. So I asked ChatGPT to read this article and then expound upon it.?

The Result:

The concept of creativity is complex and can be viewed from different angles. One perspective is that creativity involves generating ideas that are novel, valuable, and useful. Another perspective is that creativity involves the ability to combine existing ideas or elements in new and interesting ways. In the case of ChatGPT generating new recipe ideas, it's using its knowledge of ingredients, cooking techniques, and flavor profiles to come up with new combinations that may not have been previously considered. However, as an AI language model, ChatGPT's approach to creativity is different from that of human creativity. While ChatGPT can generate new ideas and combinations, it's still limited by the data it was trained on and the algorithms it uses to generate output. Human creativity, on the other hand, involves more than just generating ideas but also evaluating and refining them based on personal experience, intuition, and knowledge of the context in which they will be applied.

Thanks Buddy!

...

Epilog

ME: What is the title of the article you just read

CHATGPT: The article does not have a specific title.

ME: Can you suggest a title

CHATGPT: Sure, based on the information you provided, here's a possible title for the article: "Exploring the Benefits and Drawbacks of Plant-Based Diets for Health and the Environment"