Salvaging my childhood shortbread recipe with AI

And how unimpressed my kids were

A few days before Christmas, my 4-year-old son asked me if we could bake some biscuits.

I went to our recipe book shelf, took down the notebook containing handwritten recipes from my childhood and flipped through it until I happened upon my trusty shortbread recipe.

However, years of baking with enthusiastic infants have left it in a sorry state.

Keen to preserve the recipe before further enthusiasm erased it forever, I snapped a photo of it, opened the Gemini app on my phone and asked it to transcribe the recipe.

After identifying it as a “classic 3:2:1 ratio shortbread recipe”, it provided a perfect transcription of the recipe, before offering to suggest some modern variations.

As is so often the way, Gemini’s summary of its ‘thinking’ process is as interesting as the finished output (e.g. initially misreading the oven temperature as 50°C, before correcting it to 150°C in a subsequent step).

I then asked Gemini to design a visually appealing A4 recipe card…

…which I then printed and laminated, ready for insertion into our child-proof family recipes folder.

Ok, my childhood shortbread recipe isn’t the Herculaneum scrolls (and, it turns out, is only half an ounce of butter shy of the BBC’s shortbread recipe).

However, it does illustrate what a multimodal AI model, available to anyone with an internet connection, is now capable of in response to two short prompts (deciphering handwriting, making educated guesses of illegible text, sense-checking measures and temperatures and designing a recipe card, with subbed down instructions and appropriate illustrations).

What strikes me more than what Gemini did in less than a minute, is how unremarkable these capabilities seem to my kids. I showed them the laminated card when they got home from school. My 8-year-old daughter’s reaction? “Meh”. They’re of a generation for whom these capabilities aren’t novel or surprising. They’re a given. They won’t remember a time when it wasn’t easy to decipher illegible text, morph media from one format to another or create designs from a single text prompt.

Luckily, AI developments are slowing down to give us all time to catch up. Oh, wait…