m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

While the recipe collection still needs a lot more photography (including what I’ve taken but not uploaded yet), I have added some AI-generated images to the table of contents for fun and metadata.

I used PlaygroundAI, which has a generous free tier, and all the strange reduplications and omissions of other visual generative AI. Like text AI, it spends a lot of time in the uncanny valley of compositions that almost make sense but give themselves away as based on no true understanding of the subject matter with the small details that are so glaringly wrong. You can see some monstrous stuff in their community feed, though my biggest problem was four-legged, wingless roasted chickens.

I learned some of the dark art of telling the AI that chickens have wings, but I did not spring for the extra steps required to improve the images programmatically. I also didn’t follow through on my original intention to keep the image styles consistent from chapter to chapter, so if I were going to publish the cookbook I’d want to start over.