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).
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.