Instacart's AI Recipes Look Literally Impossible (404media.co) 36
An anonymous reader shares a report: I hate cookbooks without pictures. We eat with our eyes first, as chefs love to say, but what's more important to me is that if I'm making a dish for the first time, I want to see what the final product should look like to know I did it right. It's not so much about presentation as it is about knowing that I browned the chicken skin enough. An image of a recipe will not be this useful, I think, if it was AI-generated, and especially so if the fact that the image was AI-generated wasn't disclosed by the recipe. That, to my surprise, is exactly the case with thousands of recipes the grocery delivery service Instacart is suggesting to its users. Some of the recipes include unheard of measurements and ingredients that don't appear to exist.
[...] As I was browsing, I noticed that Instacart was offering me recipes that appeared to complement the ingredients I was looking at. The concept doesn't make a ton of sense to me -- I'm going to Instacart for the ingredients I know I need for the food I know I'm going to make, not for food inspo -- but I had to click on a recipe for "Watermelon Popsicle with Chocolate Chips" because it looked weird in the thumbnail. Since I have eyeballs with optical nerves that are connected to a semi-functioning brain I can tell that the image was generated by AI. To be more specific, I can see that the top corner of the plate doesn't match its square shape, that the table-ish looking thing it's resting on is made up of jumbled slats (AI is particularly bad at making these series of long, straight lines), and then there are the titular watermelon popsicles, which defy physical reality. They clip into each other like bad 3D models in a video game, one of them to the left appears hollow, and for some reason they are skewered by what appears to be asparagus spears on the bottom end and capped by impossible small watermelon rinds at the top.
[...] As I was browsing, I noticed that Instacart was offering me recipes that appeared to complement the ingredients I was looking at. The concept doesn't make a ton of sense to me -- I'm going to Instacart for the ingredients I know I need for the food I know I'm going to make, not for food inspo -- but I had to click on a recipe for "Watermelon Popsicle with Chocolate Chips" because it looked weird in the thumbnail. Since I have eyeballs with optical nerves that are connected to a semi-functioning brain I can tell that the image was generated by AI. To be more specific, I can see that the top corner of the plate doesn't match its square shape, that the table-ish looking thing it's resting on is made up of jumbled slats (AI is particularly bad at making these series of long, straight lines), and then there are the titular watermelon popsicles, which defy physical reality. They clip into each other like bad 3D models in a video game, one of them to the left appears hollow, and for some reason they are skewered by what appears to be asparagus spears on the bottom end and capped by impossible small watermelon rinds at the top.
Re:who the fuck is even submitting this..... (Score:1)
Someone who wishes they were and will never be a real one.
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A mildly amusing article, not sure why it has earned a dozen hate-comments. WTF? Y'all are getting bored with bashing Taylor Swift?
Re: who the fuck is even submitting this..... (Score:1)
How very appropriate. (Score:1)
This article starts off with the same irritating, rambling SEO-geared preamble that most recipe websites also use.
Re:How very appropriate. (Score:5, Insightful)
And requires an account to read it.
I'd rather have badly AI-generated images.
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ill continue to say it. 404media is trash. stop posting it here.
Re:How very appropriate. (Score:4)
And completely failed to show the image under discussion.
Your blog sucks (Score:2)
Can't even read without subscribing (Score:1)
Wow nothing like a dumb article that you can't even read for "free", you have to exert effort to subscribe to read the whole thing!
Super mid.
This is a big whiskey, tango, foxtrot. (Score:5, Informative)
Not only does this appear to be rambling idiocy, even the beginning of it fails to hit home.
I hate cookbooks without pictures. We eat with our eyes first, as chefs love to say, but what's more important to me is that if I'm making a dish for the first time, I want to see what the final product should look like to know I did it right. It's not so much about presentation as it is about knowing that I browned the chicken skin enough.
And when I was growing up the typical recipe was passed to you from a relative or neighbor on a card and if you hadn't eaten it before, you had zero clue what it looked like. Real humans have imaginations, and aren't afraid of trying new things because new experience is a thing we require to continue to grow and learn.
Aside from all that? This is a shit-show nothing of an article. Who the hell would vote this shit through?
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It's almost like the complaint itself was some LLM-generated ramble.
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It's almost like the complaint itself was some LLM-generated ramble.
That'd be one way to get Slashdot traffic up. Have bots posting to bots being replied to by bots. Perfect!
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An LLM-like comment in the persona of The Sphynx: When truth becomes stranger than fiction, then fiction shall become truth.
Re:This is a big whiskey, tango, foxtrot. (Score:4, Insightful)
needs are also different today. because a lot of people don't learn cooking from someone experienced.
Growing up my mother prepared most meals from basic ingredients. ie scalloped potatoes began with bottle of cream, raw potatoes, flour, butter, a garlic clove, onions.
watching her cook, I learned how these things are commonly preped and handled, I learned what the the start of roux looks like before its ready for the liquid, lots of little visual details that you can take an apply to working on/with a recipe you have never prepared and have some level of confidence things appear as they should even without pictures.
My wife likes cooking today but she grew up in a household were scalloped potatoes were something that came out of box with Stouffer's written on it. Without a photograph (at least when I met her) she would not know the difference between chopped, finely chopped, and minced. Having pictures of at least the final product if not preparatory steps along the way was the difference between a recipe she could attempt and one she would not have felt comfortable executing. Additionally without pictures you have no benchmark to appraise your work.
Obviously inaccurate, impossible photos are likely to be worse than no photos for someone trying to determine on their own if they are doing somehting correctly. The good news right now there are lots of great cooking resources. However as the net gets flooded with AI generated non-sense and fake pictures that could become a challenge.
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I agree most modern cookbooks seem to suck and have a lot of fluff that is banal and useless.
Earlier edditions of the Joy of Cooking are still my goto despite the fact that I know Rombauer did not actually test every recipe. She included a lot of explanation and theory in the chapters which is useful background and her stuff does work.
The modern equivilent IMHO is America's Test Kitchen. Its NOT without the "We love food don't we" BS but detail on 'why this recipe works' they include is usefully and appli
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I own a bookstore. I sell cookbooks.
Cookbooks that sell all have full-page color pictures of every recipe. People buy them because they flip pages and think "That looks like something I would like to eat..." even though their results will look nothing like what is pictured.
Older cookbooks were recipes and instructions for cooking. Modern cookbooks are advertisements.
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I own a bookstore. I sell cookbooks.
Cookbooks that sell all have full-page color pictures of every recipe. People buy them because they flip pages and think "That looks like something I would like to eat..." even though their results will look nothing like what is pictured.
Older cookbooks were recipes and instructions for cooking. Modern cookbooks are advertisements.
Advertising has taken over the universe. And it's pretty much the antithesis of information.
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Someone trying to save money? (Score:2)
I also know that making good photo's of food is an art by itself.
And many of these food photographers are very poorly paid.
So now this lot found a way to spend even less...
But I assume they save most by not cooking at all
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And most of what appears on food photos is not food or barely food coated and glued with random varnish, paint, woodwork glue, sawdust, hair dressing gel...
Look directly at Instacart for the image (Score:2)
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Searching for "Watermelon Popsicle with Chocolate Chips" turned up the Instacart page https://www.instacart.com/stor... [instacart.com] with an image that just looks like sliced watermelon with chocolate chips shoved into the flesh.
That doesn't match the description in the article. It could be your link is the original image of the real food made by the human who first added the recipe, except when you're searching for ingredients (ie you are about to spend money) the Instacart system has been programmed to find matching recipes and then dynamically generate punched-up images with size/resolution that fits the site's pagination style templates. Perhaps it's generating the images based on market-research that people are more often indu
So A"I"-generated /. articles? (Score:1)
That's where this is headed.
And then the software can repeat itself ad infinitum. Followed by A"I"-generated comments.
AI on AI (Score:5, Funny)
Is this a post from an AI bot about a poorly written AI post?
Is this AI masturbation?
I suppose the question really is: who made money on this?
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No, do NOT train AI to masturbate! This will be the certain downfall of society should this occur...
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And is this a comment from an AI bot about a post from an AI bot about a poorly written AI post? Whatever percentage of the internet is now written by AI bots will pale in comparison to how much is written by AI bots a few years from now. Soon the likelihood of actually seeing something written by a human on the internet will be negligible. But I for one will not miss the pre-AI bot internet, as I will be out dancing with humans in the real world... at least for some more years before they are all replac
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msmash trolling Slashdot with SEO garbage (Score:2)
How low can you go?
The bright, bright AI future (Score:2)
Tender baby hearts marinated in a savory fecies-infused sauce, topped with a crispy golden crust. A unique and flavorful dish perfect for those seeking new culinary adventures.
– makes about 4 servings –