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🌿 AI to plan your meals and an Ammi grows a decision tree

🌿 AI to plan your meals and an Ammi grows a decision tree

+ Halloween costume confusion and the new ammi.ai Referral Program!

Ruqaiya
October 05, 2023

Remember when it was January? Well, it’s October now!

Here’s hoping wherever in the world you are, the weather is on its best behavior this month.

In today’s newsletter:

🍎 Apple Sauce: AI to support your weekly or daily meal planning efforts
🌱 Planting the Seed: A sweet encounter with a beloved AI fundamental - the decision tree
🍇 Fruitful Harvest: Great tidbits from the community on visual search
🍀 Bonus: The freshly sprouted ammi.ai Referral Program!

I’d like to start by sharing a conundrum a lot of us are currently dealing with. October is upon us, which means folks are scrambling to figure out Halloween costumes.

My kid requested to be a "butterfly doctor" for her school Halloween parade. Cute, but confusing: is it a doctor who treats butterflies, a butterfly that’s a doctor, or a butterfly-human-doctor hybrid? She offered no clarity.

I turned to AI for some inspiration. Recently, OpenAI - the makers of ChatGPT - released DALL·E 3, the newest version of their text-to-image AI model.

Using Microsoft’s Image Creator powered by DALL·E 3, I input "butterfly doctor costume" which generated these variations:

Is there a word for ‘creepy + cute’? ChatGPT did not have an answer for me.

In pursuit of something less intense and more manageable, I input “butterfly doctor costume for kids simple”. Here’s what I got:

If you are slightly confused by this, you are not alone.

After a few iterations, I think I have a good idea of how to make this happen.

Butterfly wings, antennae, a white coat, and a stethoscope should do the trick.

Armed with inspiration, a glue gun, and the scraps in my craft bin, I’m off to piece together Butterfly M.D. Wish me luck!

🍎 Apple Sauce

Time for the ‘sauce’, or overview’ on AI apps we’ve been trying out, that may be useful to you!

October is spooky season, so we picked a spooky topic for Apple Sauce. Few questions spark more horror than ‘What’s for dinner?’.

Whether you’re responsible for providing meals for yourself or your family, coming up with a meal every night is a complex calculation with several variables: available ingredients, dietary restrictions and preferences, and the time and resources at your disposal.

The good news is there are several AI tools out there to keep our brains and appetites intact. I’ll share a few here, and you can further explore those that sound most delicious to you!

Quick n’ easy apple: Mealpractice

Named after a funny pronunciation of the word ‘malpractice’, which aptly describes my cooking skills, Mealpractice offers a free AI-powered recipe generator. Simply select your meal preferences (protein, nutrition style, and cuisine). The app will return three recommended recipes (main dish + sides) and you can choose one to get the fully generated recipe.

I like this tool because it’s free and requires minimal effort. Just a couple of clicks, and boom - you’ve got a recipe. Sometimes they are obvious combinations but it’s nice to have them handed to you when you’re mentally wiped out. My husband and I made this steak + veggies + potatoes meal as recommended by the app:

Pretty basic, but yummy!

The drawbacks are there are no options to customize and the app generates one meal at a time versus a weekly plan. Nevertheless, I keep going back to this app to discover new dishes across different cuisines.

Customizable weekly meal plan apple: MealMate AI

MealMate is a simple app where you can select dietary preferences and allergies and share additional details in plain English to output a customized weekly meal plan. I lack the patience to type out our family’s various preferences, so I used Audiopen - my current favorite AI app - to quickly record a suitable blurb to put in the custom request text box:

MealMate is free, does not require you to create an account or submit any personal information, and generates a great baseline for weekly meal planning. You will need to find recipes for the recommended meals on your own, but I like this as I have my preferred recipe source: looking up the dish on YouTube and clicking on the first video with a granny pictured in the thumbnail.

Sour apple: Roast My Meal

Upload a pic of your latest culinary creation to have it roasted by AI. Roast as in harsh comedic critique, not roast as in cooked to crispy deliciousness in an oven. I got our Mealpractice meal roasted:

“Asparagus, not broccoli. Hah, AI, you will never win”, I said as I wiped the tears streaming down my face.

🌱Planting the Seed

Embark on your AI journey by learning about the fundamental concepts and terminology. Let’s demystify AI topics and headlines in language your kid could understand!

A ‘meet-cute’ is a first encounter between two entities that is typically cute, and leads to a great connection. I would like to tell you about my meet-cute with AI.

In my first job out of college, I worked for a software company that sold data, analytics, and AI software. I didn’t have deep expertise in some of those domains, so I learned about them along the way. One of the features of that software was you could build machine learning models - or models to enable machines to learn from data, and thus build AI - via clicks. This was great because I do not code, I click. One of the simplest models you could build is called a decision tree. You’ve probably seen a decision tree in some form or even created one. Here, let me cook one up.

A decision tree: in practice

A decision tree is essentially a series of conditions that go from broad to increasingly specific. Given some data, which will be evaluated at each condition, the decision tree model will output an answer! Hopefully, the answer to the above model is that you will share this newsletter with someone who might enjoy getting last night’s dinner roasted by AI.

I loved ‘meeting’ the decision tree because it is so easy to understand. It very clearly models the decision-making that humans do every day. And after seeing a decision tree represented in code, I understood how machines could be trained to make decisions like us.

I guess you could say, everything ‘clicked’.

🍇Fruitful Harvest

We’ll pluck some of the best AI Prompts, AI-generated images, and overall good stuff from the ammi.ai community and share them here.

Last week’s poll:

Do you use visual search tools, like Google Lens?
Yes: 71%
No: 29%

Fresh picks on visual search from the ammi.ai community garden:

I've mostly used the app "Seek" which identifies plants/animals/insects/etc. I didn't even realize Google Lens was on my Pixel phone, but that should have been obvious in hindsight.

I also really like to use the lens tool to transcribe hand-written notes into editable text for word!! I’ve used the feature in multiple languages now and it’s quite impressive. Also, when travelling- lens has been able to find me local medicinal combinations that has been pretty cool!!

I use the visual search tool on Amazon. If I like something that I see , like a piece of furniture, and want to find something similar to it, this tool is EXTREMELY helpful. The search engine results are near-identical products that can be bought on Amazon.

I use it a lot to test it's botany skills by Pointing it at a tree or a plant to tell me what it is. Good for fun facts when you're out in nature. Unfortunately, I have a mystery plant growing in one of my indoor pots but google and I have yet to figure out what it is.

I've used them, but they haven't always been super helpful! As a women's basketball fan, I've been enjoying this Google Lens ad though.

👩‍🌾Cultivating Conversation

Your thoughts are invaluable — whatever they may be! Feedback on anything above? Gen AI prompts or AI Artwork to share? Questions that you’d love to explore with the ammi.ai community? Reply to this email.

Here is a question from ammi.ai to you:

🪴 Propagation Poll:

Have you ever experienced a meet-cute?

Share additional detail, along with your first name and city or country in your response, if desired.

💐If you liked this, pollinate with our new Referral Program!

We’re excited to announce our new referral program. You can now receive free gifts for sharing ammi.ai with friends, colleagues, and loved ones!

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