Flavorful is something I keep coming back to: an attempt to find out whether I can take a specific point of view about cooking and put it inside an AI system.
A good cookbook teaches you to cook the way its author does, so could an AI system do something similar — but more responsively, in the moment, with whatever's actually on hand?
I don't know yet. So I keep poking at some of these questions:
- How do I shop so I can eat well all week without pulling down six cookbooks?
- What can I make with what's on hand right now?
- Could a system teach me a cuisine I don't know yet, a little at a time, by cooking rather than reading?
I like to cook improvisationally, taking a recipe I like and twisting it into something new. One version of Flavorful I keep returning to works like this: I start with what I have — say miso and cream — and it offers a few directions, like Miso Alfredo, miso butterscotch, or miso mashed potatoes. I pick one and adjust from there. The suggestion is a scaffold, a supporting structure that reveals possibilities I hadn't thought of and falls away as I make my own choices.
So Flavorful isn't a product, and I'm not sure it ever will be. It's a domain I care about — the place where I get to work out what it takes to build an AI tool that meets my own standards.