With this post, I am continuing on the project to collaborate with ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post. Last week we saw the result, a post about Sweden and Swedish vegan semlor written by ChatGPT-4. In this post, I will share how the post was generated and my experiences working with ChatGPT-4 as a coauthor for the blog. The goal was to have ChatGPT help me through the entire process, from researching a country, choosing a dish, and creating a vegan recipe, to helping me with the photoshoot. To better judge the research, I decided to cover my native Sweden on the blog in this ChatGPT-4 food writing mini-series.
A series on working with ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post
Chances are high you have heard of both text-based AI models and AI-generated images in the past year as both of these technologies have recently made a huge jump in quality and availability to everyone. The text-based models, so-called large language models (LLMs for short) in particular have received a lot of attention, both good and bad. If you are not too familiar with large language models, you can read a short introduction at the bottom of the previous post.
In this series, I explore using ChatGPT-4, one of the latest and most developed LLMs, to write a post for the blog. One neat thing about ChatGPT-4 in particular is that it is multi-modal, which means it does not only deal with text. It also accepts images as input and can use another AI tool (DALL-E) to create new images, such as the images in this post (based on a photo of myself). In other words, in addition to “just” generating the text for a blog post, ChatGPT-4 has the potential to be a food photography coach, where I “show” it my photos and ask for feedback. I briefly tried using ChatGPT-4 as a food photography coach in the recent post about Kiribati, where ChatGPT-4 suggested I rearrange the gai lan and add a bit of red to complement the green. In the next post in this series, I will detail how I used ChatGPT-4 as a food photography coach for the post about vegan semlor.
Posts in this series about using ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post:
- Sweden: vegan semlor – a food blog post by ChatGPT-4
- Collaborating with ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post (this post)
- ChatGPT-4 as a food photography coach
ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post
In this collaboration, I wanted to try a few things. I wanted to have ChatGPT-4’s help researching Swedish cuisine, selecting a dish, and coming up with a recipe. In addition, I wanted ChatGPT-4 to write their own blog post about Swedish cuisine using two approaches. The first approach was to ask them for each paragraph one by one, detailing the paragraph in the prompt. The second approach was to ask for the entire post at once. The post I judged to be the best is the one I published last week, as the first part of this series. read on to learn which of the approaches I found to work best.
- Pick a country [already done by me]
- Read up on and write about the cuisine
- Select a representative dish that is or can be made vegan without too much of the original dish being lost
- Research the dish and existing vegan versions
- Write about the dish
- Choose or adapt a recipe
- Cook, shoot, and eat
- Edit and upload photos
- Final touches and SEO (search engine optimization)
- Post
- Marketing (newsletter, Instagram, Pinterest)
Training ChatGPT-4 to write like me
In order to get ChatGPT-4 to write like me, I showed it a few examples of recent posts. A cool thing with ChatGPT-4 compared to its predecessors is that it has internet access. That is, I can send links to my blog and it can read the contents to analyze style and layout to better create posts that fit the blog. (Without internet access, I’d have to paste the entire blog post into the text window. Doable but not as elegant.) So I shared the links to my 5 latest posts and asked them to analyze the contents for outline and style. The outline was quite good and did not just pull the headings from the posts but compared them, named them appropriately, and discussed their contents, as shown in the screenshot below.
Style analysis
In order to write like me, I asked ChatGPT-4 to analyze the style I use in the posts above so I could include those keywords in my subsequent instructions. I think they did a good job of analyzing the tone I try to use when writing.
Me: That is a really good summary [refering to the outline analysis above].
Can you summarize the writing style with some keywords to help us generate these prompts for when we work on the text?
ChatGPT-4: The writing style of your blog can be summarized with the following keywords:
Informative: Provides detailed information about the dishes and their cultural significance.
Personal: Includes personal experiences and reflections, creating a connection with the reader.
Engaging: Written in an approachable, reader-friendly manner that encourages interaction.
Educational: Offers insights into different cuisines and their adaptations to a vegan diet.
Descriptive: Vividly describes ingredients, flavors, and cooking processes.
Passionate: Conveys a strong passion for vegan cooking and cultural exploration.
Using these keywords, we can ensure that our collaborative post aligns with the existing style of your blog, both in terms of content and tone.
Approach 1: paragraph by paragraph
With the desired tone established, we could dive into working on the post itself. In the first approach, I tried to describe each paragraph one by one and then string them together myself. Normally, I decide what dish to cook while researching and writing the first 1-2 paragraphs about the country and cuisine. To replicate this approach, ChatGPT-4 and I would generate these paragraphs before choosing a dish to cook.
Research, choosing a dish, and creating a recipe
Two simple prompts had chatGPT-4 generate a paragraph about Swedish cuisine and another paragraph highlighting a few dishes as examples of Swedish cuisine. For these prompts, I included the tone instructions ChatGPT helped me identify based on my previous posts. After researching and writing the first two paragraphs, I asked ChatGPT-4 to generate some suggestions for dishes that I could choose from. After some back and forth, it generated a very nice list, including suggestions of how the dishes could be made vegan (screenshot below). I gave myself the final call and went with ChatGPT’s top suggestion: semlor (plural of semla), a cream-filled pastry eaten on Shrove Tuesday (also known as Fat Tuesday, which occurred while I was working on this series. Great timing!)
Writing about vegan semlor
After choosing to make vegan semlor, I instructed ChatGPT-4 to generate the text about the dish, and include some history, current practices, related customs in other countries, and any anecdotes that stood out. This was followed by a paragraph about how semlor are traditionally made, and another paragraph about how to make vegan semlor, including substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients. Lastly, ChatGPT-4 generated a nicely formatted recipe with ingredients, instructions, and substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients. (For the recipe, I typed it into my normal WordPress recipe plugin (WPRM) instead of using ChatGPT’s formatted list.)
Sources, SEO, and final touches
Sources for vegan semlor
I find that the majority of food blog posts out there largely lack sources, making it seem that all the information is either common knowledge or created by the authors themselves. Coming from a scientific background, I strongly disagree with this practice and try to include sources as much as possible so you know where I got my information. When I write my text, I add sources as I go but ChatGPT does not do this unless very specifically instructed (and often not even then). For the vegan adaptation of semlor, I specifically asked it about other vegan recipe creators. This led ChatGPT-4 to list three blogs and give some highlights of their recipes. ChatGPT even linked to the blogs themselves but the links pointed to the main site, rather than the specific recipe.
Me: Can you give some details of how to make vegan semlor? Please find references to other recipe creators who have shared their recipes for vegan semlor. Are there any steps or ingredients that are harder to replace than others? For instance, how would you replace the whipped cream?
Other sources
For the other paragraphs (Swedish cuisine, example dishes, and background about semlor), I asked for references but got generic, negative responses. ChatGPT basically told me to find primary sources on my own by consulting books, tourism websites, and other food blogs. Not the answer I was hoping for and a big reason why I chose the familiar topic of Swedish cuisine for this experiment.
ChatGPT-4: The paragraph on Swedish cuisine was crafted based on a comprehensive understanding of Swedish culinary traditions, influenced by general knowledge up to my last update in April 2023. It synthesizes information commonly available from a variety of sources about Swedish food culture [...]
These elements are typical discussions in books, travel guides, culinary blogs, and educational websites about Scandinavian cuisine and culture. For specific historical details, recipes, or anecdotes, it's recommended to consult primary sources or works by culinary historians and chefs specializing in Swedish cuisine.
If you're looking for more detailed references or need to cite specific sources for your blog post, it might be helpful to explore culinary books on Swedish cuisine, official tourism websites, and reputable food blogs that focus on Scandinavian dishes.SEO – search engine optimization
If you have never tried driving traffic to your own blog, you might have missed SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the important work of determining some relevant keywords and phrases guests might search for. The keywords, such as “ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post“, need to be incorporated in text, headings, and image descriptions (alt tags).
To make sure people can find our post about vegan semlor, I asked ChatGPT-4 to come up with a few SEO keywords and then revisit text to make sure the phrases were present. It worked quite well without feeling all that forced. However, the text about traditional/omnivore semlor changed to being about vegan semlor so I kept the non-SEO text. I also asked it to generate an introduction for the post (where the phrase should ideally be in the first sentence) and a description for search engines.
Approach 2 – generate the entire post in one go
For the second approach to use ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post, I decided to let it write the entire post in one go. This is a bit trickier and relies on us already having picked the dish and SEO keywords so we can include them in the prompt, along with a very detailed outline. In essence, this 2nd approach relied on us having done some of the work in the previous approach. Had this not already been done, we would have to do that work now.
To generate the entire blog post in a single prompt, the prompt had to be very long and detailed. In the end, the prompt was almost 400 words long and detailed all paragraphs, a brief introduction, a meta description, and a full recipe for vegan semlor. ChatGPT-4 did struggle a bit with the post and stopped generating an answer somewhere halfway through the recipe. Maybe this output was just too long.
Picking a winner
For this experiment, I tried two different ways to collaborate with ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post. The first step, shared by both approaches, was to ask ChatGPT-4 to analyze some of my previous work for content and tone. In the first approach, I described every paragraph in detail and asked ChatGPT-4 to generate the text. In the second approach, I described all the paragraphs in detail in a single prompt and asked ChatGPT-4 to generate the entire food blog post in one go. When setting out, I suspected that the 2nd approach would give a more cohesive text where the different paragraphs could be better linked (one paragraph could lead into the next and ChatGPT had the option to refer back). Not only did this not happen, but the single-prompt approach generated much shorter paragraphs. I asked for paragraphs of around 200 words but would only receive some 80 words. In the end, I picked the first approach, of describing one paragraph at a time, as the winning candidate, in large due to the longer paragraphs with more interesting details.
Conclusion
I’ve really enjoyed this experiment of using ChatGPT-4 for a food blog post. I have experimented a bit with its predecessor, ChatGPT-3.5, in the past but wasn’t overly impressed. With ChatGPT-3.5, I chatted a bit about different dishes from different parts of the world but ChatGPT kept making things up and changed its answers when I corrected it. Hence, I didn’t have that high hopes when I started this project with ChatGPT-4 (which is why I chose Sweden as the topic for this project, so I would have some previous experience and be better equipped to discover any errors).
After having tried getting ChatGPT-4 to write like me to create the two versions of a blog post about Swedish vegan semlor, I have come to the conclusion that this is not really for me. While the text that was generated was quite good and did not contain any errors, I did not feel the writing style was similar to my own. In particular, I feel that ChatGPT uses a very different vocabulary with fancy words like tapestry and mosaic. I also feel that it failed to share many anecdotes about semlor (such as King Adolf Fredrik who might have died from eating too many semlor [1]) and traditions in neighboring countries, like Danish and Finnish semlor often eaten with jam instead of almond paste [2], [3].
Impressive recipe
On the other hand, I was quite impressed with the recipe for the semlor. It is a simple sweet wheat bun and there are a ton of recipes out there so it might not be surprising that ChatGPT managed to replicate one of them. ChatGPT even generated some good ideas for making the recipe vegan and substituting ingredients the reader might have a hard time finding. But I’ve seen some bad AI-generated recipes in the past, like Ann Reardon’s non-vegan Oreo cake created by the older ChatGPT-3 [4]. That recipe was full of confusion but she pulled through and made the cake (decorated with a single piece of gum no-less).
Not a main author any time soon
Using a different vocabulary is alright, just another style of writing really. And a few missed anecdotes and traditions might have been a decision to keep the text short. But what I really don’t like is the lack of cited sources and the struggle I had trying to get ChatGPT to add them. When I am writing about an unfamiliar topic, I want to make sure that the information is correct. Without sources, I cannot do that.
While the lack of sources is a very large thorn in my side, forcing me to manually verify every single piece of information, the biggest reason for me to not use ChatGPT-4 to generate my food blog posts is that I want to do it myself. This vegan world tour is a project where I want to learn about food in different countries; the goal is for me to work on this blog, not to have the content created for me.
A place for ChatGPT-4
That said, ChatGPT-4 might find roles on this vegan world tour. Not as the main author but maybe as an advisor. ChatGPT-4 could be a good sounding board for which dishes to choose from; the list of Swedish suggestions was very good after all. I just have to verify that the dishes exist and are what ChatGPT say they are.
Another role ChatGPT might be suited for is marketing. After hitting that publish button on the blog post, I send out a newsletter to all subscribers and share the post on Instagram and Pinterest. For the post about Sweden, ChatGPT wrote parts of the newsletter but not the IG and interest posts. But this is likely where ChatGPT can come and help out. Once I’ve created the actual blog post on my own, it just needs a brief summary and I know what is true and not.
Apart from researching and creating content, ChatGPT-4 in particular helped with one really interesting aspect of the blog post process. They helped me plan the photo shoot based on my own plates, backdrops, and fabrics. They also gave me good feedback on the photos during the shoot, helping improve the photographs while I was taking them. In the next post, I will share how I used ChatGPT-4 to help with food photography for the vegan semlor. If you don’t want to miss the next post, be sure to subscribe to the newsletter.
References
- [1]“Åt Adolf Fredrik ihjäl sig på semlor?,” Historiska Media. Available: https://historiskamedia.se/artiklar/adolf-fredrik-semlor/. [Accessed: Feb. 19, 2024]
- [2]“En kär bulle med omtvistat innehåll,” Åbo Akademi, Feb. 11, 2022. Available: https://www.abo.fi/nyheter/fraga-forskaren-fastlagsbullens-fyllning/. [Accessed: Feb. 19, 2024]
- [3]T. Møller, “Danish fastelavnsboller with cream (shrovetide buns),” Danish Food Lovers, Jan. 26, 2022. Available: https://www.danishfoodlovers.com/danish-fastelavnsboller-with-cream/. [Accessed: Feb. 19, 2024]
- [4]A. Reardon, “A.I. wrote me an Oreo Cake Recipe … is it any good?! GPT-3,” Youtube, Apr. 22, 2022. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUqPOsgu0uo&t=402s. [Accessed: Feb. 19, 2024]
