Welcome to the Food AI Weekly Bulletin, our new weekly wrapup that highlights important happenings at the intersection of AI and food.
Nowadays, there’s a lot of noise around how AI is changing food, so we decided to create a weekly brief to bring you what’s important, decipher through all the noise, and deliver actionable insights. If you’d like to sign up for our weekly Food AI Weekly, you can do so here.
Highlights
Is AI Ruining Restaurant Reviews? A new study shows people cannot distinguish between real and AI-generated reviews.
AI Food Art Is Everywhere (And It’s Not Great for Freelancers) Generative AI tools like Midjourney and DALL-E are revolutionizing food imagery, but what does this mean for freelancers and creatives who traditionally provided these services?
First, Al Michaels. Next, How About an AI-powered Anthony Bourdain? The news of Al Michaels allowing AI to replicate his voice has almost everyone freaking out, but what does it mean for the future of AI-generated avatars of famous food personalities?
Swallowing A Robot. Endiatx has developed the Pillbot, a tiny robot that can be swallowed to explore the gastrointestinal tract, potentially revolutionizing diagnostics and personalized nutrition.
Food & Nutrition Centric LLMs Could Be an Investible Opportunity. VCs see potential in industry-specific AI models, particularly in the domains of biology, chemistry, and materials, as these specialized LLMs could offer unique investment opportunities.
Brightseed’s Forager AI Finds Novel Bioactives. Cranberry giant Ocean Spray teams up with Brightseed to uncover new bioactive compounds in cranberries.
Our Favorite AI Food Art of the Week. We’ll be making this a regular feature. If you’d like your art featured, submit it on our Spoon slack.
We’re going to be exploring all of this at our Food AI Summit in September. Join us won’t you? Super Early Bird pricing expires at the end of this month.
Is AI Ruining Restaurant Reviews?
What happens when humans can’t tell real restaurant reviews from fake ones? The restaurant industry has begun asking itself this question as a tidal wave of fake AI reviews floods online sites.
According to Yale professor Balazs Kovacs, humans are already losing their ability to discern the real from the fake. Kovacs recently unveiled the results of a study demonstrating AI’s ability to mimic human-written restaurant reviews convincingly. For his test, Kovacs fed Yelp reviews into GPT-4 and then asked a panel of human test subjects whether they could tell the difference. At first, the results generated by GPT-4 were too perfect, so Kovacs then prompted GPT-4 to insert “
While this raises obvious concerns about the authenticity of online reviews and the trustworthiness of consumer-generated content, it shouldn’t be surprising. Figure 01’s human-like speech tics were creepy, but mostly because of how human its awkward conversation seemed. With typos and sub-par grammar—in other words, what we see every day on social media—it makes sense that AI-generated reviews seemed more human.
One potential workaround to this problem of AI-generated reviews is using AI to detect and notify us what fake content is, but early tests show that even AI can’t tell what is real and what is fake. Another suggestion is to require reviewers to have purchased a product to review it (similar to having Amazon labels whose reviews are from verified purchasers) and apply it to restaurants. My guess is that this will be the best (and potentially last) line of defense against the coming tidal wave of AI reviews.
AI Food Art Is Everywhere (And It’s Not Great for Freelancers)
One early application of generative AI, as it applies to food, is the creation of images. Midjourney, DALL-E, and other tools allow us to create instant realistic images with a few sentences. As a result, we’ve seen CPGs, food tech software companies, and restaurant tech startups jump on the generative art trend.
While that isn’t necessarily good news for actual artists (this WSJ article is a must-read about the impact of AI on freelancers and creatives), these tools have democratized professional-ish like photos and art for folks in the same way Canva made professional-style graphics and presentations available to anyone.
One company that’s benefitted significantly is Innit. The company, which focused in its early life on hiring celebrity chefs like Tyler Florence and spending tens of thousands on photo shoots for a recipe, is now whipping them instantly with generative AI for its Innit FoodLM.
While most Internet-savvy marketing types at food brands, restaurants, and other food-related businesses have at least learned to dabble in generative AI prompt engineering, that hasn’t stopped some from trying to create a business out of it. Lunchbox created an AI food image generator utilizing DALL-E as the underlying LLM over a year ago (the website has since gone dark), and just this week I got pitched on a new AI-powered food generator that wants to charge for its service (which is essentially a user interface to manage prompt engineering for an underlying LLM (which most likely is Midjourney or GPT-4). There’s likely a small lifespan for these types of services, but my guess is most marketing folks will learn to prompt engineers directly with popular image generators like Midjourney.
First, Al Michaels. Next, an AI-Powered Anthony Bourdain?
The Internet freaked out yesterday when news broke that Al Michaels has agreed to let an AI copy his voice, and rightly so. First off, it’s creepy. Second, this is the exact thing was the main reason the Hollywood writers and actors guilds kept striking for so long, so I’m guessing the Hollywood creative community isn’t exactly happy with Al. And finally, it goes to show you that if you throw enough money at us humans, the temptation to cave to the bots will be too much.
My guess is we’ll eventually see AI-generated avatars of famous chefs. All it would take is for the estate of Julia Child or Anthony Bourdain to get a good enough offer and it won’t be long before we hear (and maybe see) their avatars.
Swallowing A Robot
According to Venturebeat, Endiatx has developed a microscopic robot that can traverse your body and is equipped with cameras, sensors, and wireless communication capabilities. The robot, called Pillbot, allowing doctors to examine the gastrointestinal tract and be used both for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.
The company’s CEO, Torrey Smith, has taken 43 of these Pillbots and swallowed one live on stage, which can be seen here. If this technology actually works (and those pills can be made smaller because, holy cow, that’s a literal big pill to swallow), it’s not hard to imagine these being used to dial in and optimize personalized nutrition regimens.
Food & Nutrition Centric LLMs Could Be an Investible Opportunity
Business Insider asked some VCs what they’re bored by when it comes to AI and what they’re excited about. Not surprisingly, they talked alot about how it will be hard for startups to break through in foundational large language models, where big players like Open AI and Google play. And like any good VC looking at an early market they talked up up picks and shovels
Even as investors shift their focus to promising AI infrastructure startups, there may still be some opportunities for new LLM startups to win, especially when they’re trained for specific industries, explained Kahini Shah, a principal at Obvious Ventures.
“We’re excited about what we call Generative Science at Obvious, i.e, large, multi-modal models trained in domains such as biology, chemistry, materials,” she said.
Brightseed’s Forager AI Finds Novel Bioactives
Brightseed, a company that uses AI to accelerate bioactive and food compound discovery, announced that it has (in partnership with Ocean Spray) used its Forager AI to uncover novel bioactive compounds in cranberries. Forager identified multiple bioactives, such as terpenes, which Brightseed believes hold significant potential for human health. These findings, based on in silico analyses, will undergo further clinical validation and will be presented at the American Society of Nutrition’s NUTRITION 2024 conference.
This acceleration effect of new health-positive compounds is another example of the AI acceleration effect I wrote about yesterday. Things are beginning to move exponentially faster at every stage of the food value chain, which over time means our basic understanding of the rules underpinning what we do (such as food product development) gives way to entirely new rules that are rewritten in large part by AI.
Our Favorite AI Food Image of the Week: Hungry Monkey
We like looking at AI-generated food art and figured we’d show you some of our favorites on a weekly basis.
If you’d like to submit your AI-created food art (or if you’ve found one you think we should feature, drop the image and the source/attribution (preferably a link) on our Spoon Slack.
Leave a Reply