I have been reading, educating myself and generally trying to get a handle on all this Artificial Intelligence (AI) stuff.

It’s coming whether I like it or not. It seems to have its benefits, but there are a lot of cons. I’m thinking about what AI will look like in my life in ten years. I want to reap as much benefit from it as I can to help give me a high quality of life.

Here is my recent exploration. It involves sourcing a purchased spice blend, creating my own spice blend, and finalizing a recipe. I promise I’ll join the dots.

It was my two-week stint cooking the suppers. I enjoy preparing food, and I was on the hunt for something a bit different. I found a small box of Butter Chick Spice Blend. That sounded like a doable challenge.

I made the dinner according to the recipe. My wife and I agreed it was fantastic—as good as or better than any we’ve had in an East Indian restaurant.

I Googled where it was available in Canada. I don’t think of Google as AI. It just scours the internet and gives me a bunch of sites to find the answers to my questions. I followed up with some of these links but was none the wiser.

I decided to try “Perplexity AI” and use it to find the answer. This is an AI site. It gives you answers, not sites, amongst other actions.

Funny thing. It told me that even the manufacturer’s home site, which I had checked out, extolled the virtues of its spices but did not have a store locator option. Ugh!

I requested Perplexity to create a recipe using the most common ingredients in butter chicken spices. It explored recipe sites for a butter chicken spice blend. 

Voila! It generated a list of amounts and the ingredient names and provided the steps to create my own blend. Thank you, AI. That saved me hours of searching and multiple kitchen experiments.

But. There is always a but.

I prefer to cook with ingredients in grams. For example, a cup of brown sugar can be hard-packed or lightly spooned into a measuring cup. This can result in a wide variation in the quantity of each ingredient.  Measuring by weight tends to even this variation out.

I didn’t relish converting a list of over a dozen ingredients into grams. So tedious.

I requested Perplexity to convert the list of ingredient quantities into grams. Because AI is generative, it was easy. I requested that the list it had just created be converted into gram measurements.

Done in seconds. I copied and pasted the final list and steps into my electronic recipe file. Save. Job done.

Please give this a bit of a think. Have you used an AI program recently? Was it for an actual request, or were you experimenting? What is one request you could try out?

If you are curious, give Perplexity a try. To get started, you can use a ‘test request’ like “Please tell me what the best air fryer is for a two-person household sold in Canada.” You can leave the quote marks out of the request.

Warning: Perplexity doesn’t seem to do well on ambiguous or controversial topics.

I am curious about your thoughts. Please share your bit of a think in the comment section below. It will come to me for approval before posting.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

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glenn.walmsley@icloud.com