Artificial Intelligence Plating

If you haven’t yet, try DALL-E. It’s an artificial image generator where you can describe any image and it will create an image that meets your description.

I spent a week describing existing and original plating ideas to DALL-E, and I decided that -- for better or worse -- artificial intelligence will undoubtedly have a place in idea generation for a subset of chefs.

Computers are much better than humans at chess. They can evaluate scenarios 40 moves ahead and make moves that would make zero sense to a savant thinking 10 moves ahead. In a human to human match, you can cheat with AI for just a couple moves and be dramatically better off. And if you'd rather not cheat, you can study past AI games to add some "unintuitive" moves to your arsenal.

A Joel Robuchon dish described to DALL-E

This augmentation of non-human thinking onto human creation is showing up in the arts, too. @thew6rst, guitarist from @polyphia, generates some of his melodies with digital arpeggiators then transcribes them to guitar. The arpeggiators can be "random" with note selection in ways that guitarists never could, and a thoughtful human can curate that randomness into something both approachable and completely out of the reach of ordinary ideas.

There's no doubt this will also happen with food. It's just too easy already and it will inevitably get better. Some chefs will augment their own ideas with those of the machine, delegating part of the creative process in a way that transforms the human into more of a curator than the sole creative force. This is already possible for plating — I don't see why with enough advancements this wouldn't also apply to flavors too.

Take some of these dishes. I'm not saying they are masterpieces, but they do plant seeds for concepts I might have never tried otherwise. You can literally vomit a concept and Dall-E turns into a comprehendible idea.

If I made these for real, would they be creative? Would I be original? They'd definitely be new, and that’s pretty wild to think about.

Hilariously though, the AI will also produce some nonsensical images every once in a while. Here’s its recreation of a chicken and duck based dish from Arpege in Paris. The recreation of Pujol’s mole had a mole (animal) on the plate!

You can recreate this experiment yourself by signing up for the DALL-E trial at openai.com. My recommendation for creating photo-realistic food photography is to describe your idea like: Award-winning photo of [describe food in as much detail as you’d like] on [a ceramic plate/a dining table/etc.].

I explored this idea further on my Instagram, so check it out.