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).
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.
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’m slightly concerned by the fact that people are trusting recipes from the same bot that told people to put glue on pizza
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.
Semi related, but check out based.cooking for community provided recipes, with just ingredients+steps to cook.
looks at my vast collection of cookbooks from 37+ years in the kitchen
boy, that’s a goddamn shame…
The Joy of Oofing.
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.
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.
Classic Capitalist behavior and problems, now just amplified by the Capitalists new super tool… Monetary/greedy slop amplified by a new tool, jobs ruined in an archaic system that enforces jobs to survive, stolen ‘copyright’ that are only a leftover from this warring ideology, and so on.
AI is currently a tool, and people should hate the users that causes harm with the tool, or better yet, hate the underlying combative system of market capitalism that forces tools to be used like this, forces slop and structural problems, and creates enormous problems for ordinary people. They should not hate the tool - a hammer is only bad in a bad environment.
As long as we keep believing in a combative society paid for, and controlled by the ones with the mightiest tool, it won’t ever get better. Capitalism are sponsored by, and benefit only, the rich, and everyone else are the victims of their behavior, and the automatic consequences it have in all of our social lives.
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.
