Oh, no! Now how am I going to find 60" of irrelevant content about your grandma just to get a soup recipe?
This past March, when Google began rolling out its AI Mode search capability, it began offering AI-generated recipes. The recipes were not all that intelligent. The AI had taken elements of similar recipes from multiple creators and Frankensteined them into something barely recognizable. In one memorable case, the Google AI failed to distinguish the satirical website the Onion from legitimate recipe sites and advised users to cook with non-toxic glue.
Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile, are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to this digital slop.
Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions).
I’m slightly concerned by the fact that people are trusting recipes from the same bot that told people to put glue on pizza
This is like a network of small problems: the advertisement model being awful, ads paying almost nothing per view, overabundance of cooking sites, Google’s monopoly on search, search engine optimisation, Google forcing you to feed its AI to show your site in search results, AI models and their intrinsic shortcomings (such as not understanding what they output)…
Cooking sites were the first victims because of how heavily they rely on SEO shit, and how people hate it. But others will eventually go the same way.
There are only so many ways to make chicken Marsala. At a certain point, recipe writers are chasing a dwindling market.
Let’s take the example of chicken Marsala, specifically: You find one that works, and you’re not searching anymore. It’s like the baked salmon I make: Yep, the one from the '80s still works.
I feel there’s a very small window in which one looks for new recipes, as one really only needs a dozen or so before there’s enough variety that things don’t get old. If you want something else, well, that’s what restaurants are for.
Fuck AI, and also fuck search engine optimization too.
Oh, SEO is something that even Dante couldn’t come up with.
Give up all hope (of seeing the recipe), you who enter (the site)!
GenAI in its current state seems hard set on ruining the wealth of information we’ve collected and put on the internet.
These LLM recipes are a serious problem, they’re incredibly frustrating to encounter and getting more annoying to avoid. At this stage, if it’s not on a site I already trust, it’s more guidelines and concept than a recipe proper, since you can’t be sure a human has even tried making this thing yet.
I hate AI however my sympathy for these guys is not high. Most of them have been plagiarising one another for years, scalping users data and pushing their monitized drivel with a recipe as a footer.
Weirdly it’s one of the few uses I would employ AI for. Give me a recipes for abc# must have high ratings. I k ow that is what our search engines should do…but don’t due to the SEO tactics and monitising the net. These people employed the dog that’s now biting them.
I still go to the recipes, and skip over the fluff. I have found numerous errors in AI summaries of recipes when they are anything but very well know, common, ones. Very well known, common to the Anglosphere that is.
Yeah, every recipe i find online has a “jump to recipe” button that takes you past all the background and information straight to the ingredients and directions.
after cooking for nearly 20 years, i dont even use recipes unless making something specific with ingredients i am not familiar with. this excludes baking lol. how do people have a job called “recipe writer”?
I agree. Once you know how to prepare an ingredient or use a specific technique, you really don’t need to read a description of it over and over again. I don’t really understand the popularity of recipes.
I’ve gone back to physical cookbooks from the last century. SEO slop has made the the internet useless for recipes for years, and now this.
…
Please do not use recipes from AI summaries without clicking through to the correct amounts.
I mean, hell, I won’t use a recipe I find on a recipe site without cross-referencing at least a couple other recipes from other sites, because some of those are janky as hell. But the best-guess of a summarization LLM on what all those numbers and ratios are meant to be? Yeah, no. Not by itself at all, unless you’re just trying to jog your memory on something you already know and can recognize the correct values if you see them.
A couple of decades back, I was editing a column with a recipe that lacked the unit for salt. This was on deadline, so I deduced from where it was compared with other ingredients that it was 1/4 cup.
Now, no reasonable person is going to use 1/4 cup of salt in anything on a household scale. But I wasn’t really having my cooking hat on, and the proofer didn’t catch it.
The number of complaints we got was somewhat comical. “Too salty; inedible,” usw.
It of course called for 1/4 tsp.
Hah. Shocked that you didn’t just take the easy way out and wrote “salt to taste”.
It was between the flour and the water, so while one could sprinkle salt on at the end, it seemed central to the process.
looks at my vast collection of cookbooks from 37+ years in the kitchen
boy, that’s a goddamn shame…
The Joy of Oofing.
Who is trusting the google bot that recommended glue on a pizza with their cooking instructions?
There is a website www.justtherecipe.com/ for cleaning up shitty recipe articles.
You copy the link of a recipe you want to get and it removes all the fluff leaving just the ingredients and cooking instructions.
I’ve been using JustTheRecipe, which does a good job of parsing a site and just providing a recipe.
But every time I use it, I think how crazy it is that I have to.
Semi related, but check out based.cooking for community provided recipes, with just ingredients+steps to cook.
Haven’t recipes been commoditized for a while now?
DDG has shown recipes inline from Allrecipes for like 10 years now.
I’m more interested cooking advice and techniques and styles, which AI can’t actually qualitatively try and document.
Whenever I ask ai for cooking advice it just says whatever I’m doing is genius and great. Even if it’s fucking stupid or wrong.
Have to tried adding glue to your pizza? It really ties the room together.
And if glue isn’t holding it together, consider using rivets or screws instead.
Riveting!
(god, are those a bitch to remove)
I only know one method. You just destroy the rivet completely with a small metal drill. It’s not clean or nice, but who cares as long as it works.
Yeah, that’s how I did it. There were fucking hundreds of them in the van, but I mourned zero.
The other day pig tail was on sale at my local store, and I bought a bunch to make soup.
Apparently boiling them all into soup had way more gelatin than I’m used to from regular bone broths and the broth is like nearly solid jello.
I feel like I was getting closer to glue.
Those are great to add to beans or chickpeas.
For example, feijoada relies on those and pig ears for thickness, while other ingredients (like sausages, jerk, bacon, smoked pork ribs, etc.) get added for the meat and flavour.
