Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) can write a luxury car advert, predict your taste in films and help you produce your own music. Now it’s proved capable of cooking up delicious cake recipes too.
Bristol-based businesses Tiny Giant and Sharpshooter Digital, recently joined forces to train a machine learning model on hundreds of cupcake recipes. They then teamed up with Little House Kitchen to make the AI-created cakes a reality.
The A.I. model served up over 80 recipes in total. Some ingredients like “troot” and “wof sprinkles” were a little offbeat, while other combinations including coriander, pear and chocolate, sounded surprisingly delicious. Once the team narrowed down the recipes, they worked with Kayleigh from the Little House Kitchen to fine-tune the machine’s suggestions and cook them up.
“We didn’t expect there to be so many unusual combinations,” said Derek from Sharpshooter. “At first, the neural network suggestions were chaotic, but over time, we got a lot of very creative and fun outputs”.
The five chosen cakes, which include a “Vanilla, Guinness and Marmalade” option, were put up for a taste test at the I’ll Be Back event, hosted by Tiny Giant Co-founders Richard Norton and Kerry Harrison, on 6th December at McCann agency, Bristol.
At the event, the three businesses spoke more about their reasons for starting the cake project, and how the process unfolded.
“We’ve seen so many headlines about machines doing human jobs, and people worrying about being replaced,” commented Kerry from Tiny Giant. “We wanted to show the public that we can work together with A.I. to heighten creativity and achieve things that haven’t been possible before”.
This world-first human and A.I collaboration has certainly created some delicious results. It also tells us that we can look forward to a future where humans and artificial intelligence can do great things together.
If you want to try out the cakes for yourself, the AI flavour concoctions were:
Coconut, raspberry and cherry cola
Vanilla, Guinness and marmalade
Pear and coriander
Lemongrass and coconut
Vanilla and blueberry dusted with twigs and wire.
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