Botober 2025: Terrible recipes from a tiny neural net

After seeing generated text evolve from the days of tiny neural networks to today's ChatGPT-style large language models, I have to conclude: there's something special about the tiny guys.

Maybe it's the way the tiny neural networks string together text letter by letter just based on what you've given it, rather than drawing from prior internet training. It's not secretly drawing on some dark corner of the internet, it's just mashing together statistically likely letter combinations.

So, when someone asked me for a list of October art prompts, like I've made in the past (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), my instinct was not to reach for the most capable language model currently in existence, but for the tiniest one I've ever worked with. I installed a version of char-rnn, originally introduced by Andrej Karpathy in 2015, and updated by my friend Dylan Hudson to work with modern libraries. For training data, I gave it a set of about 800 vintage jello recipes submitted by users in 2020.

Char-rnn's recipes are even less comprehensible than GPT-2's were in 2020. For example, this recipe for "One Banana Salad" which you'll note contains zero bananas.

One Banana Salad

2 small chow cooked cream cheese
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup boiling water
_ cup mayonnaise
1 cup mayonnaise, chopped
1 tablespoon gelatine
2 tbsp salt
1/4 cup chopped pimiento
1 cup sour cream
1 tbsp, onion salt
1 cup drained rind-chopped cream cheese

4 hours or until dissolved (ibening in the chicken stand the chopped chicken breass cucumber in saucepan. Serve with stewess 1 dip each salad dly white olives, and the chopped water and 1 1/2 cups.

I generated a bunch of recipes and chose my favorite ingredients and cooking directions for use in the art prompts. Are all of them possible to art? No idea. Are these the worst October drawing prompts released this year? Probably!

If you draw any of them, tag them with #botober2025 so I can see how it turned out!

Bonus content for supporters: a list of rejected drawing prompts, and a couple more recipes.