CHARLOTTE, N.C. — More businesses are beginning to use artificial intelligence, from education to finance and web design.
Now, restaurants and home cooks are using the technology to help with basic needs, like making a meal.
Shake Shack is utilizing products by Notco. AI is how the food tech company develops its NotMilk™ product used in Shake Shack’s new non-dairy shake and frozen custard.
Velvet Taco also announced it used AI to whip up one of its weekly creations.
"This week we're using AI, the chatGPT program, to create a taco," Raymond Burkle, general manager of Velvet Taco, shared with WCNC Charlotte.
He explained the company's head chef put in the ingredients the restaurant had on-hand. Then, ChatGPT generated four different tacos. Burkle said the company chose the best to feature.
"For the ChatGPT taco, it is served on a corn tortilla with crispy potatoes, a red chili aïoli, a blackened shrimp, some of our marinated flank steak, some chimichurri, some queso fresco, some grilled red onions and lettuce, some cilantro and fresh jalapeño," Burkle said.
WCNC Charlotte's Jane Monreal signed up for a ChatGPT account and tested it to make a recipe with a handful of ingredients. The platform generated a recipe instantly. (A taste test found it successful.)
Hamed Tabkhi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UNC Charlotte, said there has been a rapid acceleration of applications using AI.
"This new excitement is all coming from the fact that AI can start doing more reasoning, more logical reasoning," Tabkhi said.
He said it's an exciting time for AI, but he also warned there are issues that need to be worked out as well.
"At the end of the day, these AI systems are nothing rather than large artificial neural network that has been inspired from our biological neural network," Tabkhi said. "They learn to read by seeing many, many examples, which equals different data points from individuals from society images, audios, videos. And if we don't have a fair balance data and training practices, the output would not be fair and balanced."
Contact Jane Monreal at jmonreal@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.