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).
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.