It’s common for home cooks to consult the internet for kitchen recipes or food ideas, but a Filipino user just took this to a whole new level after prompting AI programs ChatGPT and Midjourney to create Filipino dishes that don’t exist… yet.
Christopher David took to the Facebook group Midjourney Official to post the stunning images generated by the AI programs, dubbing them “lost dishes of the Philippines.”
“I asked AI to create completely new Filipino dishes that don’t exist, but use Filipino ingredients and cooking techniques,” David wrote.
According to David, he used ChatGPT to create dish names that sounded like Filipino words, or pattern them after how Filipino dishes are named.
He then fed the recipe ideas into Midjourney, which produced the results.
True to the ChatGPT prompt, while the dishes do sound vaguely Filipino, as seen in the identification of ingredients such as manok (chicken), keso (cheese), baboy (pork), and dalag (mudwater fish), the rest of the names either don’t exist in the local lexicon or don’t mean what they’re supposed to mean.
For example, Tinikim na Manok would translate to “tasted chicken,” which sounds nothing like the creamy chicken dish featuring calamansi, ginger, coconut milk, toasted coconut flakes, and cilantro on top of white rice.
Another is Talukab Gisa — while the program correctly uses gisa to refer to something sauteed or stir-fried, the more grammatically correct way to write it would be Ginisang Talukab. Even so, talukab refers to the outer shell of a crab, and nothing that the carabao meat dish seems to suggest.
While some users found the dishes to be an interesting way to spark ideas, others pointed out that similar recipes already exist.
For the Balaw Sapal — soup from young bamboo shoots, corn, and coconut milk with native chicken —, some commenters mentioned that a similar dish already exists in areas such as Iloilo called tambo, although the recipe for that uses shellfish rather than chicken.
