ChatGPT may be known for its potential use as a tool and misuse as a cheating device in an academic setting, however ChatGPT has so much more to offer, one of these offerings being a device for generating recipes. However, is Artificial Intelligence capable of creating recipes you can find in a quality restaurant? That’s the question I’m set to figure out.

Generating The Recipe  

Diving into this unique experience blind made me excited but also nervous. After all these recipes are solely instruction and are limited in description, so I was unsure of how it would turn out. I went onto the free ChatGPT 3.5 program and began scouring for recipes. I generated several but one caught my eye, “delightful and refreshing Lemon Garlic Pasta.” Sounded safe enough, and I enjoy both garlic and lemon, so what’s the worst that could possibly happen? 

The Cooking Process

In preparation, I gathered all of my ingredients with the exception of fresh basil, and parsley. While searching through my pantry for red pepper flakes, I discovered the small bottle of flakes had been aging for nearly 10 years. If that was not startling enough, I also found a true gem, a Victorian-era looking bottle of “Imitation Almond Extract.” Which was an ingredient that I never knew existed, and sounds like it came straight out of the 1920’s with ingredients such as a shrub, wondra flour, celeriac, or oleo. The brand that produced the imitation almond extract began in 1987 and was discontinued in 1994, making that bottle of still unused liquid older than the combined ages of me and my sister.

Anyways, I gathered the rest of my viable ingredients and began the cooking. I started with juicing the life out of 1 and a half lemons that quickly took a turn for the worst. While squeezing the lemon halves, I lost grip of the lemon and it fell directly into the small bowl, rocketing lemon pulp, seeds, and juice into my retinas, clothes and mobile device. 

Cutting the garlic did not fare much better for me, as I had to make the judgment on which garlic to use as one my dad had just bought and the other had been sitting on the kitchen counter for the better part of a month. So I made the wise decision and played eenie meenie minie moe to determine which garlic bulb would be put into my Artificially Crafted masterpiece of pasta. Once picking the wrong garlic, I used the other bulb and began to mince away.

Boiling the water for the pasta sauna was the relieving part, as I had done so about 50 times in my life. The test of pelting a strand of angel hair across the surface of my refrigerator and seeing if it sticks has never failed to leave me with perfectly al dente pasta. 

Then in a skillet far too small for the job I was trying to achieve, I brought the olive oil to heat, and cooked the garlic before slowly adding the lemon juice, pasta, parmesan, and lastly the seasonings. I made sure that my pasta was even coated as it called for while being very cautious as to not spill the pasta that could have flown out of the pan at any given moment. 

At last, my pasta was ready to be plated, I garnished my pasta with some dried parsley flakes and extra parmesan and called it a day.

The Tasting

The process it took into making this recipe was both painful and exhausting, so I really wanted, and anticipated to enjoy the dish. However, I was sorely mistaken; The flavor notes were purely garlic with a slight afterburn of warm lemon and parmesan. I tried giving it another few bites to see if it would get better, but that was a mistake. Oh the horror, the pasta became more garlicky, I could even feel it texturally in my mouth. The putrid stench of garlic was so strong, my breath had to have killed every vampire and nostril in a 2 mile radius. I was forced to brush my teeth 5 times in a row, until my gums bled profusely. Afterwards, I had to take a shower to scrub away the industrial-strength odor of garlic and despair. 

Then the kitchen needed to be scrubbed from floor to ceiling as it smelt like death, and every dish that came into contact with the atomic warhead level of garlic stench needed to be washed twice over. Needless to say, I did not enjoy my lemon garlic pasta dinner, and I fed the remainder of it to the garbage disposal. 

Final Review 

Overall, I’d say this was a valuable learning experience when it comes to the culinary arts. I learned that garlic should only be used extremely sparingly, and not to follow any recipe with any sort of misspellings or a lack of photographs.

To any current or future chefs reading this article, I can assure you have nothing to fear at the moment when it comes to Artificial intelligence taking your career or handcrafted recipes. 

I would perhaps be willing to give ChatGPT another chance to blow my now-deceased taste buds away, however, in the meantime I’d give this abomination of a recipe for a “delightful and refreshing Lemon Garlic Pasta” a one out of five stars.