From the author

The Software I'm using

ChatGPT v4 - I divided up the world into regions that made sense to me, then collaborrated with GPT to pick out individual countries.  I would ask it for 4-8 recipes from each country, and sometimes in the introductory paragraphs it would mention a few specific dishes as well.  I've added a number on my own just because I wanted to have them here. 

It's returning very good looking recipes, sometimes you have to check to make sure it's using culturally relevant ingredients - it wants to put parmesan on everything whether it's Scandanavian, Mexican, or Thai.  Sometimes GPT can ignore some standing instructions, I find the words "default" and "critical" to both be useful. 

Midjourney v4 - I've used Midjourney daily since September 2022, I definitely have my own ways of building my prompts.  I've honed it down quite a bit, and I like that these images all seem to come from the same "family."  I'm sometimes getting fantastic results on the first try, with some other dishes I need to fuss with it for many many rerolls and prompt adjustments to get something I think is decent.  There are a few images here I'd rather replace, but the original intent of this site was a race to see how much I could create.

Moving forward, the next step will be creating some individual, culturally relevant header graphics, as well as illustrating the steps in individual recipes.

Google Sites - This was a suggestion from ChatGPT, wonderfully easy to use, I wish it supported CSS, that would save some time.  It's particularly easy to embed videos.  Fantastic tool.


YouTube videos -  I'm hand curating these, they're all over the place. 

The criteria I'm using are those that have the most of: 

Project Log

February 2, 2023

I gave myself two weeks to see how far this project could progress.  The idea was to make an AI-driven international recipe site, with all text and Illustrations created with ChatGPT and Midjourney.  This was a race to see just how much good content could be created in a short period of time.  As a professional UX'er, I did do the stuff with the maps and flags by hand -- which consumed way more time than the AI stuff did. 

I believe I will continue adding more recipes, and I have ideas for several sections (common produce of each region, common types of bread around the world, etc.)  It may also be fun to create sections for different food restrictions (Vegetarian, Vegan, Keto, Gluten Free, Kosher, etc).   Depending on the response to this site, I may continue in that direction.  mb

January 27, 2023

This project started with an idea to use new AI products to generate and illustrate recipes.  The early results turned out so well, and so quickly, that I wound up building way more than I intended to - but I'm still enjoying the process immensely and love  how the images have turned out.

The intent here was to take a look around the world at some main courses and try to capture how they were originally, classically made in their home culture. 

I'm a professional UX person, so now I'm trying to dress this up as much as I can -- but at first, it was just a race with myself to see how much I could produce in a week going as rapidly as I could.  mb