It's an APie: Artificial intelligence tries its hand in the kitchen and creates bizarre recipes such as Scotch egg and spiralised veg and SALAD pie

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An AI has been studying the cookbooks and has taught itself how to make intriguing new pie recipes — including Scotch egg pies and one with a salad filling.  

Working with a Sussex-based pie makers, the algorithm has produced thousands of recipes, five of which have been selected for production and will be going on sale. 

The AI works by looking for patterns in existing recipes and then trying to make its own based on what it learnt.

While some of the early recipes it proposed were perhaps less-than-mouth-watering, with a little guidance it soon got the hang of cooking up new pie concepts.

The experiment illustrates how artificial intelligence can provide new insights for small businesses and help dream up novel products to take to market. 

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An AI has been studying the cookbooks and has taught itself how to make intriguing new pie recipes — including Veggie spiral pie, pictured, and pear & blackberry crostata

The culinary AI is a collaboration between digital business lending platform Esme Loans and Sussex pie makers Piglet's Pantry to demonstrate the potential of emerging technologies like machine learning to help bring novel new products to market.

The AI based its recipes on thousands of existing UK-specific pie recipes — totalling nearly a million characters of text — from which the machine learning algorithm was able to invent thousands of new pie recipes.

After some refining, five novel pie recipes were selected for production — including a veggie spiral pie, a Scotch egg pie and a pear & blackberry crostata.

Reporters at the MailOnline tried the AI's 'veggie spiral pies' and can confirm that they were delicious.

'The speed and the volume of results we were able to deliver were outstanding,' said Veronika Lovett, the co-founder and CMO of Esme Loans.

'Suggestions from the AI model were usable and relevant,' she added. 

'AI and machine learning in food production is a really powerful tool, and the end result was great,' said Piglet's Pantry founder, Joanne Hunter.

'I'm always interested to try new things and am excited to explore the possibilities of new technology in the future.'

The AI model was built using GPT-2, an unsupervised text-generating language model, built by the Elon Musk founded AI research company Open AI, which has previously been demonstrated writing news articles.

When given enough examples of a particular kind of writing — whether that be news reports, Reddit comments or pie recipes — the AI can readily produce plausible-reading versions of its own without needing to be trained.

It does this by looking for patterns and structure in the examples texts given to it. 

Working with a Sussex-based pie makers, the algorithm has produced thousands of recipes, five of which have been selected for production and will be going on sale

The AI works by looking for patterns in thousands of existing recipes and then trying to make its own based on what it learnt

The algorithm is programmed to produce 30 new recipes at a time.

At first, the recipe-writing AI came up with a few unpalatable suggestions — along with some intentionally humorous cooking instructions.

These included 'Ask your vegetarian or vegan chef to cook your fish in a pan containing just enough water to just cover it' and 'Ask your fishmonger to cook your fish in a shell that fits the pan.'

These examples are great illustrations of how the AI learns, producing sentences along the way that sound like they might appear in a cookbook, even if they don't entirely make sense.

In a similar vein, a recipe for a 'filo-topped fish pie' from the model's first-generation output called for putting tomato, prawns and Parmesan 'through a ricer to leave a sticky paste' — guidance unlikely to lead to an award-winning filling.

After adjusting the algorithm's parameters and rejecting unappetising recipes, however, the AI's instructions began to strike the right note.

For example, one recipe proposed by the machine was for a gluten-free pie that contained a gluten-free filling.

While this sounds obvious, it requires the AI to realise that the filling must be gluten-free if the pie is to be too — and to work out which ingredients are gluten free.

In this way, the algorithm gathered knowledge on gluten free recipes from the digital cookbook initially given to it and then translated this understanding into the creation of a new gluten-free pie.

The experiment illustrates how artificial intelligence can provide new insights for small businesses and help dream up novel products to take to market

While some of the early recipes it proposed were perhaps less-than-mouth-watering, with a little guidance it soon got the hang of cooking up new pie concepts

The culinary AI is a collaboration between digital business lending platform Esme Loans and Sussex pie makers Piglet's Pantry to demonstrate the potential of emerging technologies like machine learning to help bring novel new products to market

One of the AI-generated recipes now being produced was selected because the algorithm had stumbled upon an interesting new twist for vegetarian pies — both literally and metaphorically.

The 'veggie spiral pie' it dreamt up contains spiralised vegetables — those which have been cut into linguine-like strands — adding a new dynamic to the pies' texture.

This was an idea that Ms Hunter and her colleagues had never thought of using before. 

According to Ms Hunter, plant-based pie fillings make up a considerable slice of Piglet's Pantry's sales as vegetarianism and veganism become increasingly popular. 

The AI based its recipes on thousands of existing UK-specific pie recipes — totalling nearly a million characters of text — from which the machine learning algorithm was able to invent thousands of new pie recipes

The 'veggie spiral pie' it dreamt up contains spiralised vegetables — those which have been cut into linguine-like strands — adding a new dynamic to the pies' texture. This was an idea that Ms Hunter and her colleagues had never thought of using before

According to Esme Loans, emerging technologies like machine learning are seen by many small-to-medium-sized business as somewhat of the 'great unknown.' 

However, Ms Lovett noted, bringing insights gained from using artificial intelligence into the workplace can 'open many opportunities to gain a competitive advantage.'

'Any business with intentions of scaling should be having discussions around how Machine Learning and AI could be used to help them succeed.' 

Through their team-up with Piglet's Pantry, she added, 'we have demonstrated this is within reach of small and medium enterprises, and not just big tech firms.'

More information about how the AI cooked up its new pie recipes can be found on the Esme Loans website.

The AI model was built using GPT-2, an unsupervised text-generating language model, built by the Elon Musk founded AI research company Open AI, which has previously been demonstrated writing news articles