Can artificial intelligence make a tastier chocolate chip cookie recipe than a human being? At the risk of upsetting millions of grandmothers everywhere, we set out to find an answer. We recruited Dan Souza, chief content officer for America’s Test Kitchen, for our experiment. He matched the Test Kitchen’s Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe against recipes from two AI programs, ChatGPT and DishGen.
Why chocolate chip cookies? “Cookies, when you make small changes to ingredients, we find that you get some pretty massive differences,” Souza told Morning Edition ’s A Martinez. So, it's kind of a fun one to use as a litmus test for how successful a recipe development could be.” How did the experiment work? Souza asked each AI program to come up with a chocolate chip cookie recipe.
The results were nearly identical. Souza said there’s a good reason for that. “What it gave me was a pretty traditional chocolate chip cookie recipe.
If you look on the back of Toll House [chocolate chip] morsels, which is where most chocolate chip cookie recipes kind of originate, it was a pretty good mimic to that. You have your classic ingredients, you have your flour, you've got white sugar and a little bit of brown sugar, a couple of eggs,” Souza said. “What you find with these engines is they're pulling from all over the place and so you get sort of an average output, and it looked like a really average cookie to me.
” Souza said both of the programs were fairly straightforw.