Google Developers Create An A.I. That's Developing Recipes And Destroying My Life
Throughout the duration of my employment here at The Takeout, I have made no secret of my distrust of robots. As the founder and sole member of this site's official Robot Beat, I have publicly vowed to protect and defend our precious readership from the the existential threat they present to the good men and women who are the backbone of the food industry. Robots, artificial intelligence, and the dastardly tech titans that control them all from the shadows, are making designs to replace our chefs and waiters, our delivery drivers and sommeliers. Why just recently on the Google Cloud blog, developers Sara Robinson and Dale Markowitz reveal that "baking" was a trending search term in November and December, so the duo decided to create an A.I. to help them develop new recipes and...
Wait. (Checking Google blog again.)
"But being in the AI field, we decided to dive a little deeper into the trend and try to understand the science behind what makes cookies crunchy, cake spongy and bread fluffy — and we decided to do it with the help of machine learning. Plus, we used our ML model to come up with two completely new baking recipes.
Oh my god. This is my job. The robots have been tipped off, and now they are coming for me.
(Deep breaths)
Okay, I need to calm down and examine the facts. Robinson writes that she and Markowitz collected hundreds of recipes for baked goods, standardized their measurements, plugged them into a Google Cloud tool called AutoML Tables and built a machine learning model, and now there's an A.I. bot that's popping out recipes in less time than it takes for me to walk from my couch to the kitchen. Awesome. But maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe this A.I. will be a complete disaster and churn out recipes that are pure nightmare fuel.
WHAT HAS OCCURRED CANNOT BE UNDONE
I have trained a neural net on a crowdsourced set of vintage jello-centric recipes
I believe this to possibly be the worst recipe-generating algorithm in existence pic.twitter.com/cwQwOpUNDv
— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) February 7, 2020
It seems like Robinson planned for this possibility, writing that by using a metric called "feature importance," the new A.I. was able to analyze what variables make the consistency of breads, cakes, and cookies so unique. It then produced a recipe for "The Cakie," which combines cake with the crispiness of a cookie, and "Breakies," a mash-up of bread and cookies that Robinson reports has the texture of a muffin. Both recipes, with pictures, are posted on Google's blog, and tbh, they look pretty good. Guess it's time for me to start looking for a new career path. Anyone know of any good, stable jobs in journalism?