Short answer: Jordan Metzner says generating meal images with AI was expensive, slow and poor at dishes that may not exist yet, so he switched to Unsplash's open library of images. Recipes default to two servings.
Watch this answer from Episode 12 (starts at 9:42) · Episode 12 notes and transcript
From Episode 12: Recipes from Receipts: AI Cooking, Kidpreneur E-Com & Replit’s $250M Raise, starting at 9:42.
Sam Nadler [9:41]: Absolutely. I love it. Lastly, where are you pulling these images from? I think you initially tried to use AI to generate the images, but that did not work. So where are you actually getting these images?
Jordan Metzner [9:51]: Yeah. Good question. So I try to use AI to generate them. One, it was a little bit expensive and slow. And two, these are like actual meals that don't maybe don't exist yet. And so, like, AI wasn't the best at generating these things. And so I moved to Unsplash. I believe Unsplash, which is an open source library of images, and so I'm using Unsplash's tool. And I mean, I guess, like, with carrot and tahini, they've got great images. I mean, this is chicken and pineapple. This has great images. I mean, this is bolt on a sandwich. I've never had that before. I mean, that sounds incredible, actually. But I get with bolt on strawberries and cilantro. So, yeah, it's crazy what you can do here. Again, I mostly built this just for fun. Also thought it'd be a great addition to the show. I love the idea of exporting it, so you could kind of like take the recipes with you. You could also work on serving sizes.
Jordan Metzner [10:47]: So, these are all based around two servings, but, if you wanted to like use this as a mechanism to make a recipe for a party or something like that, then, that might be a great way to do that to, kind of add those additional features.
