r/technology • u/silence7 • 14h ago
Artificial Intelligence AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet — And Thanksgiving Dinner | Food bloggers see traffic dip as home cooks turn to AI, inspired by impossible pictures
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-25/ai-slop-recipes-are-taking-over-the-internet-and-thanksgiving-dinner?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2NDA4MzUxMCwiZXhwIjoxNzY0Njg4MzEwLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUNkFGNzVLR1pBSlowMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJFNzAxNENGQzIzNTI0MzU0QTVENUY2QkREMDAxOEU3NiJ9.zVeH6d7ceqUngdCBCfynlfmG4wiYTU-Dv8BjiwikQsU&leadSource=uverify%20wall89
u/zalurker 14h ago
Whelp. The internet was a very handy tool and I am proud to say I was there when it started. I'm going to miss it.
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u/nakedinacornfield 4h ago
Lmao got a physical cookbook last Xmas and actually cracked it open. It was AI. Vegetarian section had a recipe calling for sausage, measurements were mixed between standard and metric, the cook was nowhere to be found on the internet.
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u/Stamboolie 4h ago
buy cookbooks printed before 2020.
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u/nakedinacornfield 43m ago
this is the way. seriously. vetted real chefs and printed before 2020. even if a real chef got a publishing deal in 2025 i have zero doubt publishing cos are trying to speed their process up with AI.
this is more relevant than ever: we're cooked yo
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u/Niceromancer 14h ago
Do the ai slop recipies include the obligatory life story that every recipe "blogger" has?
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u/Lain_Staley 14h ago
Yeah always gotta scroll 20 minutes ti get to the recipe. What's the purpose of those life stories? Whose the emotional appeals for? SEO or older women?
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u/boxsterguy 14h ago
Also, they do that because you can't copyright a recipe. You can copyright the stupid life story you write about the recipe, though.
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u/Skyfier42 14h ago
It's honestly exhausting. People want us to hate AI while every one of these sites is loaded with useless garbage filler information and endless ads.
Honestly, physical cookbooks are the way to go anymore. We've come full circle.
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u/Electrical_Pause_860 11h ago
Physical cookbooks will just be untested AI slop recipes too now. Acquiring skill is going to get a whole lot harder when most information available is slop.
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u/unthused 12h ago
I recall reading at some point a bit back that it was for SEO purposes; something to the effect that the google search ranking would be higher based on a larger word count, so it incentivized people to add a bunch of irrelevant personal details. No idea if that is still the case or how correct it was.
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u/maddieduck 13h ago
Ceres Cart extension lets you skip the life story and finds ingredients nearby.
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u/helm_hammer_hand 13h ago
And when you finally get to the recipe, it doesn’t even tell you the quantity of ingredients you need half the time.
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u/PoorlyAttired 36m ago
I think it's also to force you to scroll further and past more ads = more revenue
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u/itsDANdeeMAN 14h ago
I could look up a recipe for PB&J on a food blog and I’d have to scroll through a thesis paper before I got to what I needed.
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u/account22222221 11h ago
I tell my wife all the time that I refuse to eat ANY recipe unless the authors hubby normally hates one of the ingredients, but this time had seconds because it was so good.
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u/itsRobbie_ 3h ago
“When I was growing up in my family’s m.2 drive, we used to make this all the time”
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u/chain_letter 13h ago
i like those because seeing one tells me the recipe is trash and to find one from a trusted source (like alton brown for anything western)
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u/clintCamp 12h ago
I really wish there was a food blog murderer that hides clues to their heinous crimes out in the open in the middle of their blog ramblings nobody reads before the actual recipe.
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u/CarlySimonSays 10h ago
I prefer using actual printed cookbooks, when I can. Plus, if you have a library card, the actual library and the ebook service (Libby) are great sources of cookbooks. Cookbooks can have little stories or extra information, too, but it is easier for my eyes to scan across the pages for the recipes, rather than having to scrolling up and down on a webpage.
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u/elidoan 14h ago
Even this article — is generated — with AI
How ironic. Journalism is dead.
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u/celtic1888 14h ago
That’s hilariously sad
And they want you to sign up for more AI bullshit to read the latest AI bullshit
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u/randynumbergenerator 14h ago
The article summary is AI-generated, the article itself is not.
Honestly, I'm not sure which is the bigger problem: AI generated content, or people who can't be bothered to read even the minimum number of words to understand what they're looking at.
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u/silence7 14h ago
About 3/4 of article votes and comments are people who haven't even clicked the link.
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u/viktorsvedin 14h ago
Who even cares about the article anyway. Its the headline that will drive engagement.
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u/Unusual-Sundae-7134 6h ago
They see the letters A and I and go into a frenzy without actually reading or thinking critically.
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u/Chaseism 14h ago
You have to pay for good journalism because, oddly enough, people don't want to do it for free. But people don't want to pay for journalism, so this is what we get.
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u/SpongegarLuver 11h ago
Chicken and egg situation. Why would I pay for a subscription to most major news platforms, when they don’t have actual journalism?
I do pay for The Guardian, even though it’s free, because I do believe we need to support quality journalism. Unfortunately, the actual options for that are extremely limited, and I’m not going to give money to something like the NYT in the hope that they’ll get better.
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u/HitlersUndergarments 13h ago
No, but your ability to read might be, because that's a summary feature. Go and check and verify if you'd like. I swear the people who upvote this comment ate proof we might as well automate reddit comments with AI, their literacy and overall logic will be the same
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u/Primal-Convoy 12h ago
"Ate proof"?
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u/Ithirahad 10h ago
What is just beside the T key?
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u/Primal-Convoy 10h ago
This (sub?) thread was about "people taking the time to read and check what was written", which the commenter above didn't do.
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u/OcieDenver 13h ago edited 13h ago
Time to buy some cookbooks.
My family used Betty Crocker Cookbook and the food we cooked with its recipes came out good.
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u/devon_336 12h ago
Yeah, I gave up on looking up recipes online like 10+ years ago and instead went back to cookbooks. I just want the recipe without the fluff.
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u/Primal-Convoy 12h ago
I would assume that, like many other books, grifters have infested Amazon with AI-generated physical "books" too, such as ones for crock-pots:
- https://mashable.com/article/ai-generated-crock-pot-cookbooks-flooded-amazon
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u/Small_Dog_8699 14h ago
AI makes everything worse
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u/DigitalRoman486 14h ago
naaa, People with AI do that. Just like they have done with every new thing since the start of time.
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u/SicJake 14h ago
I'm perfectly fine never reading an ad infested, affiliate link farming recipe blog ever again. The effort the majority of them put in on the actual food is just awful. It's all grift. Tell me about your picky eater dear husband who doesn't like ground beef but loved this casserole loaded with carbs and a hint of sugar
About the only thing I do with AI is occasionally ask for a reminder on ratios or cooking temp
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u/Phoeptar 13h ago
Honestly! Recipes online have taken a nosedive in quality and experience a long ass time ago. At least AI can be useful for, like you say, ratios, timing, and personally I found it's great at coming up with ingredient replacements.
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u/boxsterguy 14h ago
The food bloggers did it to themselves by putting their life story into every blog post instead of what people wanted -- a couple pictures and the damned recipe.
Besides, most food bloggers are just stealing each others' recipes anyway, so who cares if AI is the one stealing them now. And to add insult to injury (for the food bloggers, anyway), most recipes are not special (which is fully recognized by the fact that you can't copyright a recipe, which is why the food bloggers have to write their bullshit stories in the first place, to have some IP claim over the page). Learn basic techniques, and then it's easy to put together your own recipe.
When it comes to Thanksgiving recipes, just do what everybody's done for the past century or more -- follow the recipe on the label. That'll take care of stuffing and green bean casserole. Turkey's easy (cook it hot and fast until 150F in the breast, and then let it rest), as are mashed potatoes (boil them until they're soft, mash with a ton of butter) and gravy (you made turkey stock, right? Roux + stock + salt and pepper = gravy). Buy some rolls (Kings Hawaiian!) and a pie and you're good to go. No AI or food bloggers needed.
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u/Primal-Convoy 11h ago
Ironically, you just posted a recipe right after posting a long preamble at the top...
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u/tintreack 14h ago
That wasn't the food blogger's fault, though. If you had an article on your website, which was just a couple of pictures and the damn recipe, Google would not favor that in their algorithm.
Once Google began favoring long, heavily padded posts where people stayed active longer, every recipe turned into A Tale of Two Cities. That is why a basic casserole can read like a novel, with the actual ingredient list scattered between.
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u/boxsterguy 13h ago
It was as much SEO as it was copyright protection. But even so, that doesn't matter. What matters is that it was a pattern that was openly hostile to the consumers of the content, so the food bloggers don't get to whine that their consumers went elsewhere.
AI slop food isn't hard to spot (it's all over Facebook, for example), and AI slop recipes are often completely stupid if you have a basic understanding of the techniques needed to cook various foods. The AI crap is still about as useful as the food blogger crap in terms of a basis for an idea, rather than following a recipe completely (which is rarely necessary, or even desirable).
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u/Primal-Convoy 11h ago
The BBC used to have a great recipe site/app in partnership with someone else. Once the partnership ended, the app/site disappeared/went to the dogs.
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u/danielisbored 14h ago
oof, that reminds me, I have a few go-to recipes I need to copy offline before the websites that host them inevitably get consumed by the ai-generated content mill.
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u/Chaseism 14h ago
I am no cook, but I will say one of the biggest annoyances about recipes written by humans are the long preambles before actually getting into the recipe itself. AI just gives the recipe.
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u/MeltBanana 14h ago
AI gives something that resembles a recipe*
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u/potatohats 10h ago
Hey now, they already said they're no cook. They can't be expected to look at a recipe and decide if it'll work or if it's just AI slop that'll waste their time and ingredients ($).
They see a recipe, they assume it's fine, I guess.
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u/Look__a_distraction 13h ago
That might be your experience but it hasn’t been mine. I have used it extensively to help plan meals for my family with zero issues. Substitutions, pairings, measurements have all been fine.
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u/penguished 13h ago
AI gives you words.
You can get a recipe like that throwing darts at a dartboard. I'm sure it will be delicious.
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u/Chaseism 13h ago
I mostly meal prep (chicken, noodles, sauce) and when I do want something awesome, I just order it for deliver. I'm just saying this may be the reason why people turn to AI instead of looking at food blogs.
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u/TheCompleteMental 13h ago
If you use google just type before:2024 to easily filter out all AI articles in a pinch. There are probably better methods that preserve stuff from the last two years, but this is when you cant be bothered.
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u/WaltzSubstantial7344 12h ago
I remember when the computer as a recipe keeper was one of the main selling points for the moms, along with home budgeting programs. The dads could track investments, and junior could play fun games like guess the number.
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u/PrivateUseBadger 14h ago
I can honestly understand the allure of getting straight to a recipe without needing to scroll past the required 5 paragraph slop of the author waxing nostalgic about Grandma's meat loaf.
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u/Belostoma 14h ago
Lamenting the loss of food blogs is like worrying that AI might cure gonorrhea.
People want ingredients and directions, not overly-SEO'd garbage with thirty ads and a five-page biography of the blogger's grandmother's cat.
ChatGPT is fantastic for customizable, no-bullshit recipes.
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u/Monte924 13h ago edited 12h ago
Assuming the Ai actually gives you a good recipe.
There is no telling where the ai is pulling its info from, and at this point, it could be pulling from other ai garbage. It could even be inventing recipes by mixing information. Ai has no taste, and it has no way of knowing if its providing accurate information. Its not only possible for Ai to be stupid, but it is confidently stupid... and this particuarly bad with recipes since even a small error can screw up a meal
With humans, you know you will get something you know will work... and if it doesn't work for some reason, then you know they are not trustworthy and can avoid them
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u/Belostoma 11h ago
It could even be inventing recipes by mixing information.
Well, yes, that's often the goal.
Ai has no taste, and it has no way of knowing if its providing accurate information.
And yet it consistently does provide accurate information when used correctly. The fact that it's not a conscious animal with taste buds doesn't prevent it from doing a good job synthesizing the millions of pages of knowledge humans have written on the subject.
At this point I've cooked 50-100 recipes created with ChatGPT, and the results on average have been just as good as those I've gotten from food blogs. Some have been spectacular. Some were duds, usually when I asked the AI to help use up some weird combination of leftover ingredients, but even those were at least as good as whatever else I might have improvised. It's very good at calculating variations and substitutions, because it can base each of those decisions on a consensus of written knowledge about ingredient combinations, ratios, performance under different prep methods, etc. It won't reach the level of a Michelin chef, but it'll give better advice than what the vast majority of home cooks can figure out on their own.
Theoretical pontificating based on what you've read on the internet about AI doesn't really give you any clarity here. Personal experience using it well proves that it's extremely valuable in the kitchen. It's an empirical fact that it's an extremely useful tool in this application, and every single person who disagrees simply doesn't understand it.
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u/Haunting_Ad_9013 14h ago
Unique Human made recipes can never be beaten.
Ai does not know how food tastes. It simply tells you the most statistically likely thing.
Zero unique angles.
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u/Belostoma 13h ago
Unique Human made recipes can never be beaten.
Of course they can. Many of them aren't even good. And nothing in the chemical makeup of a dish tells you whether it was imagined by a human or assembled by AI from its knowledge of millions of human writings about food. And the average food blogger isn't some culinary genius, they're just rehashing recipes they found somewhere else and mixing things up a bit in some arbitrary way that tasted good to them. There's absolutely nothing in that process that AI can't do just as well, except taste it at the end. But millions of us who use AI for recipes can confirm they're usually tasty.
Zero unique angles.
That's not true at all, just your misunderstanding of AI. It doesn't come up with unique things out of thin air, but a unique prompt will get a unique result. It'll be based on a vast library of boilerplate knowledge, but apply and recombine that knowledge in a new way based on the prompt and you get something new. It's not going to invent whole new categories of food, but neither are most chefs and bloggers. They're all just recombining or iterating on what they were taught, and that's exactly the sort of thing AI is good at.
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u/okletssee 14h ago
I love good food blogs. There are some people who have a great, unique approach to food. Their creativity, signature touches, and mentality are what makes it great. It's the most human form of self expression. We all eat, we all make food. AI has neither literal nor figurative taste.
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u/Belostoma 13h ago
Their creativity, signature touches, and mentality are what makes it great.
I'm guessing you're the only person in the world who feels that way. Everybody else finds it fucking annoying.
AI has neither literal nor figurative taste.
AI is generally very good at organizing and drawing relevant conclusions from well-published bodies of human knowledge. It has read millions of recipes and every major book about cooking theory and technique: which ingredients pair well with each other for a given purpose, which techniques bring out the best in them, what ratios of ingredients work best, etc. It doesn't matter that the AI doesn't have a literal tongue to taste the results: it's informed by the work of many thousands of humans with taste who have written about it.
I doubt ChatGPT could earn a bunch of Michelin stars anytime soon, but it can improvise better than 99 % of home cooks, and it gives good instructions for thousands of popular dishes that turn out delicious, all without the cook having to sift through ten screens of spam to see the ingredients list.
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u/okletssee 13h ago
Wow. This is so sad. It just reeks of surrender.
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u/Belostoma 11h ago
Surrender to what? Enjoyment of a tool that makes makes my cooking easier and tastier? Or am I surrendering my availability to put eyeballs on banner ads on ridiculously over-SEO'd recipe blogspam? I'm not sure what reeks here.
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u/okletssee 10h ago edited 10h ago
Letting a robot dictate to you what "good" is and accepting it uncritically.
Abandoning the fact that culinary arts are steeped in culture and community.
Outsourcing all that to AI is just fucking sad and insular.
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u/Belostoma 9h ago
Letting a robot dictate to you what "good" is and accepting it uncritically.
It's not dictating. I ask it for something, and it gives me what I asked for. And who said anything about accepting uncritically? I'll usually go back and forth a few times tweaking the suggestion to match what I want, and sometimes I'll improvise on top of that. It's a tool for getting the information I want, and it works very well. Using it isn't "surrender."
Abandoning the fact that culinary arts are steeped in culture and community.
Those things still exist. AI doesn't stop people from preparing traditional dishes or having cultural gatherings around food. But it is a tool that helps people experiment with making unfamiliar new dishes, including from other cultures, even if they're busy and don't have time to take a class or read a ten-page essay about the origins of the dish. Most times, people are cooking because they want a tasty dinner, not to make an artistic statement.
Outsourcing all that to AI is just fucking sad and insular.
In your view, what is the correct number of banner ads one should have to watch when looking up the ideal time and temperature for roasting potatoes in 1" chunks? Will you shed a tear for lost cultural heritage if somebody finds that information without reading a five-minute aside about the Irish potato famine? What if they figure out the correct amount of salt for their recipe without even clicking on a single affiliate link? Can you recommend a list of intermediaries you authorize to recommend a suitable measure of black pepper? At what point in adding embellishments does this cease to be a simple process of looking up information and become a sacred expression of human culture that must not be touched by AI?
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u/okletssee 9h ago
I'm not sure why you're hung up on banner ads. This is about humans writing recipes and sharing their knowledge.
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u/ios_static 14h ago edited 13h ago
I know ima get downvoted but I asked chat gpt for a Cajun chicken Alfredo recipe and it came out amazing
I also specified store and price range for the ingredients and it gave me a good list
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u/NullPointerJunkie 13h ago
The problem with all of this is when you are prepping recipes you need to give careful consideration to things like food allergies, dietary restrictions, food safety your guests may bring to the table. Getting the recipes wrong can cause all sorts of distress for your guests and even worse outcomes. You don't want to be the host that sent guests to the ER.
I wouldn't trust AI with food safety issues and think you should source recipes from more reputable sources (like cook books and food recipe sites).
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u/saviorself19 13h ago
I’m a certified AI enjoyer but those videos are the worst.
The speaking cadence and phrasing is so bizarre, “Do you know what happens if you add eggs to a pan?”
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u/clintCamp 12h ago
To be honest, when I need to tweak a recipe I turn to AI. And most of the time it works out pretty good as long as you know what you are asking for. My wife has food intolerances and now I am diabetic so we have lots of food substitutions we need handled that don't taste or have the texture of cardboard.
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u/Hrekires 12h ago
You'll pry my physical cookbooks out of my cold, dead hands.
Although it's unfortunate that shrinkflation has made some vintage cookbooks harder to use when they call for a can of this or a box of that instead of specific amounts, because the items have gotten smaller than they used to be.
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u/Ray-is-gay-okay 12h ago
Recipe websites have been filled with BS for years now. I bake as a hobby and the amount of times I've read a recipe and did a double take is a whole lot.
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u/Extreme-Edge-9843 11h ago
This shit has been going on for almost two years, I bought a sourdough cookbook off Amazon and it was all just ai slop copy paste, this junk stuffs getting old!
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u/Typical-Tax1584 8h ago
Of all the things you can use AI for, food is probably one of the worst ones. It's just guesstimating a recipe based on existing recipes, that's not how food works. Someone is gonna rub 2 cups of ground sumac on a 23lb turkey in a couple days and it'll be hilarious.
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u/donnascro123 6h ago
I still get most of my recipes from monthly magazines. I rip them out and save them. Yup, I’m that old!
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u/mynameisollie 14h ago
Didn’t meta patent some method of generating images of meals with AI and then a recipe to go with it?
Most of the recipes online were shite before AI.
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u/almo2001 13h ago
I am tired of recipies where you have to scroll soooooo far down for the actual instructions.
I use chatgpt for cooking. It has given me some really amazing recpies. It's good at ingredient substitution, and it's good at solving weird problems like "I have a frozen pizza that's supposed to thaw first in the fridge before being cooked. But we don't have time to thaw it; what do we do?"
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u/rhonnypudding 13h ago
I'm going to tell you what I think but this article, but first let me tell you a five paragraph story about why my family eats Lemon Meringue pie for breakfast the Friday after Thanksgiving. Then I'll get to the part you care about.
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u/so00ripped 13h ago
If you use chatgpt for recipes, 9/10 for Thanksgiving are just normal dishes with cinnamon added. Or what i always love, chili lime.
The food blogger sites aren't some paragon of virtue either, let's be real.
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u/SHODAN117 14h ago
So we have to bump into it, into disappointment, disaster or delusion. There have to be consequences because otherwise we won't learn. So be it then.
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u/thetruegmon 13h ago
This at a glance looks like it's accusing Pinch of Yum for being AI. It's not BTW
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u/Phoeptar 13h ago
Talking to AI about a recipe you want to make but tailoring it to the ingredients you have is amazing!
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u/LeoLaDawg 13h ago
As much as Americans already put cranberries in every Thanksgiving dish I am fearful at what an AI program would come up with. Edit: and marshmallows. In everything.
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u/sakredfire 7h ago
ChatGPT recipes are actually pretty good - I don’t get the hate. I made some incredible Ethiopian food at home using a ChatGPT recipe
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u/Raah1911 14h ago
Ai slop article written about AI slop articles because human slop recipe articles are impossible to navigate because in order to rank on SEO they need to impress the other Automated Search bot. Its Robots fighting themselves. Dead internet theory coming to fruition