Food bloggers and recipe developers are warning home cooks to be wary of AI-generated recipes that could turn this year’s Thanksgiving dinner into a tragedy.
As Bloomberg reports, they’ve watched in horror as AI slop has made searching for a reliable recipe on sites like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest a potential minefield.
The publication spoke with 22 independent food creators, who said that “recipe slop” is damaging their businesses — while misleading consumers into cooking up monstrous and often inedible dishes.
It’s a sad state of affairs, once again highlighting how AI slop is choking out reliable information on the internet — while simultaneously undermining the livelihoods of those whose content is being overwhelmed by competing AI slop.
Following recipes via Google’s notoriously error-prone, AI-generated summaries is definitely a bad idea. According to Bloomberg, the summaries are telling home cooks to bake Christmas cakes for three to four hours, potentially turning them into a chunk of charcoal. Cookie recipes end up like cloying lumps of sugar. Even entire AI-generated recipe sites being listed on Google are sending home cooks down the wrong path.
Google told Bloomberg in a statement that its AI Overviews feature is only a “helpful starting point to learn about a dish.”
“We’re focused on making it easy for people to discover and visit useful sites that have a good user experience,” the company said, implying that users are being turned off by overly cluttered and hard-to-navigate food blogs.
None of this should be particularly surprising. After all, large language models lack any form of human intuition and are simply rehashing and paraphrasing existing content they were trained on, no matter how hard AI companies try to distract us from that reality. The tech also lacks the ability to actually test a recipe in the real world, making it a notably terrible source for cooking advice.
Worse yet, those making a living from developing recipes are watching as referral traffic from sites like Google plummets, forcing them to scale down their operations and even lay off employees, according to Bloomberg.
Clean Eating Kitchen owner Carrie Forest told the publication that soon we could get to the point at which an “AI is just talking to itself” as traffic to her website continues to dwindle.
Others are noticing that their content is being scraped wholesale by Google’s AI Overviews, forcing them to reconsider publishing any new guides. Some bloggers have come across websites ripping off their recipes wholesale and evading discovery by mangling them with the help of generative AI.
The trend paints a troubling picture of a slop-dominated future, and how it all turns out is anyone’s guess — but in the short term, at least make sure a recipe is human-tested before you try and serve it to all your relatives at Thanksgiving.
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