Hey everyone,
I have noticed that some recipes on the internet make no sense and have my suspicions that they may be AI slop. The ratios are off, the cook time is unlikely, the illustration is AI made… But it’s hard. And it will likely be getting harder to identify AI generated recipes in the future.
It’s come to the point that I have a hard time trusting a recipe witten after the AI craze started (let’s call it 2025). I’m so suspicious of everything, my go-to “authenticity” check is to not bother with recipes that have recent publication dates. But this isn’t exactly fair nor fool proof.
Do you have tips on how to spot an AI generated recipe?
Yes, cookbooks are the way to go. SEO and AI slop have made finding recipes on the Internet a frustrating experience. I’ve slowly built up a collection of about five to seven cookbooks. Those books offer me plenty of choices. For example, just a few days ago, I made buttermilk biscuits and ended up having four different recipes to compare. I also find myself flipping through them to discover new recipes. It’s offline, peaceful, and I’m not bombarded with ads.
It’s kind of like music. I used to have a collection of cookbooks to do exactly that, just like I used to have a collection of music in various formats as technology changes. But it’s too limiting. It can never compare to a digital search among all the world’s recipes/music.
My approach was to buy a recipe manager. I generally search online to find something new that looks interesting. But then I import it into my recipe manager so I can use it without all the life story, the excessive ads, the really annoying screen redraws to show yet more ads, the popped to display additional ads or the inline partial recipes that are more ads in disguise