What AI is Cooking Up in Chicago

ChatGPT was one of the top-searched terms in Chicago last year. Curiosity about the AI tool inspired one Edgebrook resident to create a cookbook.

Mike Wisniewski decided to develop his AI skills after getting laid off from his job last winter. With a background in aerospace engineering and a passion for cooking, Wisniewski decided to self-publish an AI-generated cookbook: “A Dash of AI.”

Wisniewski told Hey Chicago he gave the tool the freedom to come up with recipes to get a better sense of how ideas come from generative AI.

Wisniewski first started with a prompt telling ChatGPT they would write an award-winning cookbook. He built on top of that with queries for the table of contents, instructions, and ingredients.

Those prompts spit out recipes that impressed Wisniewski like the cider-braised pork shoulder and cherry vanilla Manhattan cocktail. He has tried most but not all the recipes and thinks ChatGPT has some serious cooking chops.

But the tool isn’t perfect.

“I ran into limitations of the context window within ChatGPT, which limits basically how much it remembers from the previous conversation,” Wisniewski said. “At a couple points, I had to go through and remind it what we were working on.”

So why buy the book when you could create your own recipes via ChatGPT for free? Wisniewski said the book is an entry point into AI.

“People are afraid of AI — they don't know how to use it. They're hesitant to trust it. And what I did through the book was create a medium that is much more familiar: People know cookbooks,” he said.