Imagery and AI

The short version

The pictures are not photographs. They were generated by AI, then reviewed and approved by the author. AI tools also helped with writing, editing and checking the text. No recipe in this project has been cooked, and no image is evidence that one was.

The images

Every dish image, chapter opener, ingredient study and the cover were produced with generative AI tools — Runway, using the nano-banana-2 model. None is a photograph of food that was cooked for this book.

They are illustrative. They show what a dish should look like, and they are on the site and in the book because a cookbook without pictures is harder to cook from and harder to browse. They are not documentation.

Each image was reviewed and approved by the author individually before it entered the project, and images that showed the wrong thing were rejected and regenerated rather than accepted. Approval was recorded per image in the project’s image manifest.

The text

AI assistance was used in developing and editing the written material, and in checking it — for consistency, for structure, and for catching claims the project had told itself not to make. Claude was the tool used for that work.

ChatGPT was used earlier and more narrowly, for cover concept and art direction references. Those references were used for direction only and none was used as final artwork.

The book’s content, structure, editorial decisions and every approval are the author’s. Assistance is not authorship, and no AI tool is credited as an author because none is one.

Three things that are not the same

AI-assisted

A tool helped produce or check something. It means the work was made faster and more consistently. It does not mean the output is correct.

Author-reviewed

A person looked at it and accepted or rejected it. Every image in this project is author-reviewed, and so is the text. This is a judgement about whether something is right, made by someone who can be held to it.

Verified

Confirmed against reality — a recipe by cooking it, a name by asking someone who speaks the language. This is the one that is largely still outstanding, and the site says so on the pages where it matters.

Reviewing an image of a curry is not the same as cooking the curry. The first has been done for every image in this project. The second has not been done for any of the 100 recipes.

What AI did not do

• It did not test a recipe. Nothing here has been cooked.
• It did not verify a cultural claim, a local name or a romanisation. Those are drafts pending human review.
• It did not photograph anything. There is no photography in this project.
• It did not approve its own output. Every image and every editorial decision passed through the author.

Why this page exists

Readers are entitled to know how the pictures in a cookbook were made. A generated image of a finished dish is persuasive in a way a drawing is not, and passing one off as a photograph would be a straightforward deception even if every ingredient in it were right.

So the disclosure appears at the foot of every page that carries imagery, and this page explains it in full. It is not buried, and it is not written to be skipped.