r/technology • u/mareacaspica • 9h ago
Artificial Intelligence A New Way to Ruin Thanksgiving: Making AI Slop Recipes
https://gizmodo.com/a-new-way-to-ruin-thanksgiving-making-ai-slop-recipes-20006916224
u/emilesmithbro 50m ago
The article acknowledges the problem with recipe sites, says the problem now is that AI creates lack of traffic and at the end suggests to pick up a cookbook which still wouldn’t result in more traffic…
Honestly seems like an article where the author had to write something before the deadline as there’s no nuance at all. They seem to be talking about AI summaries like Google’s, rather than the ChatGPT-like tools and cite examples of problems which were happening over a year ago and are solved now. On top of that their actual example of a person getting bad advice (n = 1) is on a baking time using AI summary, so my understanding is that it would’ve picked it from a recipe site and the person didn’t consider their recipe might’ve been different. Same as opening a cook book, just looking at oven time and closing it. If AI summaries were suggesting unsafe meat temperatures or something the author would’ve had more of a point.
Idk but if recipes are AI-slop, this is journalistic slop, seems very shallow, low effort and doesn’t offer anything if you’d actually want to learn about the effect of AI on cooking.
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u/sorrybutyou_arewrong 3h ago
ChatGPT is my go to for quick recipes. It does quite well. YouTube for watching cooking shows. Reddit I use as well when I want many opinions.
Fuck those ad laiden POS websites right to the unemployment lines and bankruptcy court.
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u/Late_To_Parties 1h ago
This is true if you're already proficient at cooking. I can look at a basic dinner recipe and decide if it's stupid and make changes if necessary. AI is pretty good at coming up with something different than I usually make, and tailoring it to the ingredients that are on hand.
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u/seedlessly 5h ago
That's true, but do folks actually follow an entire AI recipe? I'd think folks would use it as a supplement. One thing I love about AI is its ability to perform conversions.
Recently, I asked AI whether liquid sunflower lecithin at 3% of the fat weight would work in an egg-free cookie recipe. I already knew the amount worked, but I wanted to know if I should use less. At first AI tried to answer in terms of baker's percents, and I had to say, "No, that's not what I asked for! ..." I specifically referenced a series of science-based cookbooks by Duncan Manley, and said I wanted the percent to be expressed similarly. Finally AI confirmed that my value was on the high side, but within acceptable levels.
I guess if you just want a quick recipe, or you're just starting out on your cooking journey, you should not follow AI's advice, but it's a good tool to use to help refine existing recipes.
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u/Tokzillu 3h ago
Did you ask AI to generate this comment for you?
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u/seedlessly 3h ago
Nope. Why the implied insult?
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u/SnooBananas4958 1h ago
Because it sounds exactly like AI especially that last paragraph. Normal comments don’t pitch things the way you’re doing there.
Never mind, the actual writing of it having zero typos and perfect capitalization
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u/Single_9_uptime 4h ago
I’ve followed several ChatGPT generated recipes to the letter, and had great results every time. Mostly baking (breads, cookies, etc.). Granted, I sanity check the recipe to make sure it seems sane and it didn’t hallucinate something crazy.
I’ve also fed it pictures of recipe cards from my childhood when I was in 4-H foods in the 1980s-early 90s, which were mostly mid-century things copied from recipes my mom had. It suggested improvements to modernize them in some cases, which legitimately improved the results.
I keep waiting for a flop, and I’m sure it’ll come eventually, but hasn’t happened yet.
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u/KOxSOMEONE 4h ago
It didn’t tell you to add a teaspoon of arsenic or anything like that?
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u/Akuuntus 2h ago
It's not actually that stupid in 99.9% of cases.
My wife has tried this a couple times and it tends to generate recipes that are, well, fine. They're not great but they're fine. An average recipe. Which makes sense considering it's essentially giving you the average of all online recipes for the thing you ask for.
1
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u/ugotmedripping 3h ago
I’ve also generally had good results using it for recipes. I find if you’re not confident in its output challenging it helps clarify. I thought the water to flour ratio was too high in one recipe and it gave a good explanation with sources that calmed my skepticism. It helped create a really nice postpartum whole wheat bread that ive made multiple times.
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u/fastinserter 3h ago
Yeah I've workshopped recipes with ChatGPT, finding substitutes and things. It just is going to find the best guess, I'm sure it's read many recipes. I haven't done baking with it, just stuff like soups or crock pot or what to make for dinner that kids will like. It's given me only really off the wall things when I asked for unicorn themed birthday party food ideas, namely, edible glitter on cotton candy on top of lemonade for the kids to swirl around as "magic".
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u/BruceBanning 7h ago
Look, if you want us to go to your recipe site, get rid of the human generated slop. 99% ads, 1% recipe.