Recipe writers may be cooked.
As The Guardian reports, AI chatbots are constantly stealing bits and pieces of their culinary insights and mashing them together into a statistical stew.
Even setting aside the question of whether the resulting recipes actually produce tasty food, the bots are biting the hand that feeds by destroying the business model behind the content they’re stealing: clicks that would be going to their food blogs are being diverted to the chatbots instead, depriving the actual recipe creators of eyeballs — and ad revenue — that historically kept them afloat.
“There are a lot of people that are scared to even talk about what’s going on because it is their livelihood,” Jim Delmage who runs the blog and YouTube channel Sip and Feast with his wife Tara, told The Guardian.
Matt Rodbard, the founder and editor-in-chief of the website Taste, wasn’t afraid to doomsay.
“For websites that depend on the advertising model,” he told the newspaper, “I think this is an extinction event in many ways.”
One of the main offenders is Google’s notoriously wonky AI Overviews, which provide a summary of search results that appear above the actual links to sites. Its most notable contribution to the culinary world was infamously recommending to put glue on pizza, an epicurean nugget of wisdom it sourced from a facetious Reddit comment.
The AI Overviews have been around for two years now, but recipe creators say they started seeing a nosedive in traffic since Google launched its “AI Mode” for search in March, through which it started offering full-blown AI-generated recipes, according to The Guardian.
And they’re disasters. Karen Tedesco, the author of the blog Familystyle Food, tested the AI Mode by searching for “Italian meatballs,” and was given a “synthesized” recipe that included hers and nine other sources, including a Washington Post recipe for Greek — not Italian — meatballs. Too many cooks, as they say, spoil the broth.
Rodbard, at Taste, acknowledges that food blogs weren’t doing themselves any favors by barraging visitors with too many ads — which, whatever you think of AI aggregators, they spare you the trouble of plodding through.
“Ad tech on these recipe blogs has gotten so bad, so many pop-up windows and so much crashing, we kind of lost as publishers,” Rodbard said.
Maybe, he suggests, the old-fashioned cookbook may be due for a comeback.
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