I’m a little bit of a cooking nerd, and a pretty adventurous eater. There are some flavor combinations that, when they’re explained to me, make a lot of sense, and I can see how they would work well together, but I would never think of putting together myself in a million years unless I saw some high-end chef on a cooking show or fancy restaurant do it first.

Off the top of my head, I remember someone on iron chef making some sort of fish ice cream, and someone on some other cooking show making some sort of liver pate and jelly donut, and both were very well received by the judges. I’d never think of putting those ingredients together in those ways, my first gut instinct if you just told me that those foods existed without further explanation was that they sound gross, but after thinking about it or having the chefs or judges explain them, I can totally see how they can work.

There’s only so many chefs cooking at a high level like that though, whose brains are wired in such a way that they really understand how the flavors can work together and can work around the biases that most of us have and put together ingredients in new and unexpected ways.

AI often won’t have the same biases we do (though it may be biased in other ways) so it could lower the barrier to entry for those of us who have the hands-on skills to put those sorts of dishes together, but maybe aren’t quite creative enough to come up with them by ourselves, and for the more creative types it could potentially become a useful sounding board for them to bounce ideas off of.