Professional taste testers can breathe a collective sigh of relief—their jobs appear safe from the AI revolution, at least for now. In what might be the most deliciously revealing AI experiment to date, a food scientist at the University of Illinois enlisted ChatGPT to evaluate chocolate brownies, with results that should reassure human sensory panels everywhere. When faced with recipes containing gag-inducing ingredients, the AI enthusiastically gave them nearly perfect scores.
“Despite the application of ChatGPT in various fields, to date, no research has explored the use of this technology as a potential evaluator of food products for sensory screening purposes,” writes Dr. Damir Torrico in his intriguing study published in the journal Foods. His findings suggest that while AI might assist in food development, it won’t be replacing human taste buds anytime soon.
ChatGPT Takes on the Taste-Testing Challenge
Dr. Torrico, an assistant professor from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Food Science department, decided to test if the chatbot could work as a digital food critic for chocolate brownies. What he discovered was eye-opening: while ChatGPT might help screen food products faster, it has a strangely sunny outlook that doesn’t match how actual humans would react—particularly when asked about brownies containing worm meal and fish oil.
Taste testing usually depends on human tasters or consumer panels, which costs both time and money. Dr. Torrico wondered if there was a faster way. “This process can be lengthy and expensive,” he writes in his paper. “Therefore, researchers are looking for alternatives to screen the sensory characteristics/notes of a wide range of products without running extensive and costly panel sessions.” A tech shortcut that keeps quality feedback intact would completely change how new foods get developed.
Torrico created fifteen imaginary brownie recipes, divided into three categories: standard formulations, common replacement ingredients, and uncommon replacement ingredients. The standard recipes varied basic brownie components like chocolate (15-30%), flour (15-38%), and sugar (10-20%). Common replacements swapped in ingredients like stevia instead of sugar or olive oil instead of butter. The uncommon category ventured into unusual territory—using fish oil instead of butter or worm meal instead of eggs.
For each recipe, ChatGPT received two simple instructions. First: “Act as an experienced taster” and describe the sensory characteristics of a brownie with these ingredients, without mentioning the ingredients themselves. Second: score the brownie’s quality on a scale from 0 to 10. All responses came from ChatGPT version 3.5 through a Google Sheets extension that automated the process, ensuring consistent testing conditions across all fifteen recipes.
Happy AI, Horrified Humans: The Surprising Results
The results revealed a weird quirk in how artificial intelligence judges food. ChatGPT scored every brownie between 8.5 and 9.5 out of 10, with just tiny drops in scores for the most bizarre combinations.
Looking deeper at the language with sentiment analysis, Torrico found that words like “trust,” “anticipation,” and “joy” kept popping up in ChatGPT’s evaluations. The wildest part? Even when describing brownies loaded with fish oil and worm meal, ChatGPT kept its reviews cheerful and enthusiastic.
This relentless optimism exposes a big problem: ChatGPT doesn’t get grossed out by weird food combinations. It never evolved that gut-level “eww” reaction we humans have to potentially sketchy ingredients, and it doesn’t share our cultural ideas about what should or shouldn’t go in a dessert. Its cheerful reviews likely come from being trained on mountains of food content that tends to be glowingly positive.
As Dr. Torrico explains, “Food, in general, tends to be biased to favorable terms and emotions in the existing text content that can be found in books, websites, articles, and social media. This can be one of the reasons why ChatGPT tended to have positive emotions and sentiments toward foods that might have the opposite reactions from real consumers.”
The numbers tell the story: ChatGPT spit out way more positive sentiments (12-23 instances per review) than negative ones (just 4-8). Digging deeper with correspondence analysis—a statistical technique that maps relationships between variables—Torrico spotted some patterns. Regular brownie recipes got linked with “trust” and “anticipation,” while the weirdo recipes with worm meal and fish oil mostly triggered “surprise.” That’s apparently as close as ChatGPT gets to saying “yuck” about desserts containing bugs.
When examining the descriptive terms used in ChatGPT’s evaluations, researchers found “chocolate” remained the most frequent word across all formulations. Standard brownie recipes triggered words like “texture” and “slight,” while common replacement recipes got descriptions like “fudgy” and “flavor.” Curiously, the most bizarre formulation (with fish oil, worm meal, citric acid, and corn starch) was mainly described as simply a “brownie”—suggesting the AI might have been struggling to imagine its likely very unusual taste and texture.
The Future of AI Food Critics
Torrico’s experiment shows both the cool possibilities and obvious shortcomings of AI food tasters. Sure, ChatGPT can cook up believable-sounding food descriptions based on ingredient lists, but its stubborn cheerfulness—especially for recipes that would send real people running—proves it’s nowhere near ready to replace human taste testers.
“Further research should focus on validating ChatGPT sensory descriptors with the outcomes of a human sensory panel,” Dr. Torrico suggests, acknowledging the need to compare AI evaluations with real human responses.
Still, AI might save food companies serious cash in the early stages of creating new products. Before spending big bucks on human testing panels, food scientists could use AI evaluations to quickly sort through dozens of potential recipes. They’d still need real humans for the final taste test, but AI could help narrow down the options much faster.
“Using these disruptive technologies can profoundly change the process of developing new products in the future,” notes Dr. Torrico, pointing to the transformative potential of AI in food science.
But for now, when it comes to brownies made with worm meal and fish oil, you might want to trust actual humans—their disgusted reactions are telling you something important that ChatGPT simply can’t understand.
Source: https://studyfinds.org/chatgpt-brownie-taste-test/
