ChatGPT’s peculiar taste

Stay away from my brownies, ChatGPT: The generative artificial intelligence tool rates chocolate brownie recipes highly—even if they contain fish oil.

If your afternoon coffee break also includes a sweet treat, like a brownie, it might interest you to know that generative artificial intelligence (genAI) also has opinions on this chocolate delight. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign food scientist and perception expert Damir D. Torrico recently used the genAI tool ChatGPT as a sensory evaluator of 15 chocolate brownie formulations, some with common ingredients and some with unusual substitutions, including fish oil and worm meal (Foods 2025, DOI: 10.3390/foods14030464).

Torrico is interested in using AI to model sensory responses based on physical and chemical inputs. The idea is that genAI could help food product developers winnow hundreds of formulations to just a few for a human sensory panel to test.

To Torrico’s surprise, ChatGPT turned out not to be particularly discriminating when it comes to brownie recipes. It gave all 15 formulations a score of 8.5–9.5 out of 10. “ChatGPT was being, I think, polite in some cases, just saying that it really liked the food,” he tells Newscripts. But he notes that this positive bias is also commonly observed in human sensory panels.

The results suggest that ChatGPT isn’t great at evaluating recipes, but Torrico thinks that with some customization, genAI could speed up food product screening. Even so, he says, “I don’t think we’re going to replace humans.”