Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
AI Google

Google AI Summaries Are Ruining the Livelihoods of Recipe Writers 104

Google's AI Mode is synthesizing "Frankenstein" recipes from multiple creators, often stripping away context and accuracy and siphoning traffic and ad revenue away from food bloggers in the process. Many recipe writers warn this shift amounts to an "extinction event" for ad-supported food sites. The Guardian reports: Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile, are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to this digital slop.

Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions). Without this essential IP, many food bloggers earn their living by offering their work for free while using ads to make money. But now they fear that casual users who rely on search engines or social media to find a recipe for dinner will conflate their work with AI slop and stop trusting online recipe sites altogether.
"For websites that depend on the advertising model," says Matt Rodbard, the founder and editor-in-chief of the website Taste, "I think this is an extinction event in many ways."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Google AI Summaries Are Ruining the Livelihoods of Recipe Writers

Comments Filter:
  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @06:10AM (#65868533)

    Now they should sleep in it. Recipe sites have long been part of the worst of the internet with auto playing videos, pop-over adverts, and 15 pages of rubbish before the actual recipe.

    The only sane way to get a recipe online is to look at the picture on Google, and if it looks good, paste the link into https://www.justtherecipe.com/ [justtherecipe.com]

    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      100% this. Recipe sites jumped hard on the SEO bandwagon, and became so hated for it that "having to scroll down 15 pages to actually find the recipe" became the butt of a joke.

      • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @06:42AM (#65868593) Journal
        The ones that didn't do that didn't get shown in Google search results, so they didn't get any traffic.

        There may be a conflict of interest with Google directing traffic to websites that show ads.
        • Who cares they were always a bunch of chumps making money off public domain work while i had to work, they can find some new grift or get real jobs.

        • There may be a conflict of interest with Google directing traffic to websites that show ads.

          Google's ranking algorithm downgrades sites where content is dominated by ads, so I think the dynamic here is the other way around: Recipe sites layered on huge numbers of ads in order to generate revenue, which caused their search ranking to drop, so then they had to go all-in on SEO to fool the ranking algorithm into raising their visibility.

    • by evanh ( 627108 )

      Not a cause and effect situation. Given this is a universal LMM issue across the web, recipe site bed shatting isn't why the LMM search engines aren't linking to source materials.

      • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @06:56AM (#65868615) Homepage

        The point is that people who willingly contributed to the enshittification of the internet have no ground to stand no to complain about the enshittification of the internet.

        • by piojo ( 995934 )

          It's not just that the pages are bad compared to what they should be. It's that most of those pages shouldn't even exist. If you don't have something new to say, you are just adding chaos to the world. I suspect 15 years ago it would have been easier to find quality recipes than it is today. Certain trustworthy publications are still great, but they typically do have something new to day.

    • Aye. Those sites are the very embodiment of the crap that inspired Pa to say, "SHUT UP AND TALK!"

    • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @08:11AM (#65868663) Journal

      Now they should sleep in it.

      Spite isn't a good reason to destroy. Is the person making this complaint one of the ones you have a beef with specifically? Because if not, the attitude of "some recipe writer pissed me off therefore they're all scumbags and we should let google destroy everything" doesn't really make sense to me.

      Thing is they are not wrong, regardless of whether you personally like them.

      People write stuff for all sorts of reasons. For clout. For fun. For money (ads). For the community. What literally no one does is write to anonymously feed google's bottom line with no recognition or remuneration. The internet is amazing because of the sheer breadth of stuff on it. And AI companies will happily kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, so they can feed you ads and get profit before people notice that there's nothing new in the slop.

      Shooting the messenger because a different messenger wearing similar clothes annoyed you is just a terrible idea IMO.

      • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        Is the person making this complaint one of the ones you have a beef with specifically?

        Yes. Browsing their blog: https://www.sipandfeast.com/ki... [sipandfeast.com] is best done with an ad-blocker. I gave it a go with ublock turned off... That one page connects to 200+ domains. Auto-playing videos. Shady ads disguised as "print to PDF". The only thing that site has going for it is that it doesn't contain 15 pages describing how awesome the recipe is, quick blurb then into the recipes.

      • Spite isn't a good reason to destroy.

        You missed the point. I'm not spiteful, nor are we destroying anything. They destroyed themselves by making their sites unattractive to visitors. This predates LLMs and Google. People have literally started products to circumvent their bullshit long before AI in its modern form existed.

        Is the person making this complaint one of the ones you have a beef with specifically?

        No one made a complaint. This is an oped written by a third party. So no, I don't have a beef with that person specifically. If you're going to try and make a point by being pedantic it helps to pedantically read TFA first.

        People write stuff for all sorts of reasons.

        Pr

    • Some recipe sites also jumped into generative ai fairly quickly as well. Generative AI is great for recipes. A couple of years ago someone gathered lots of recipes for chocolate chip cookies, took the average in Excel, and won a chocolate chip cookie baking competition. This is essentially what generative ai does when generating recipes, and they are generally decent.
    • On a good site, hidden in those 15 pages of rubbish is often the "why". And therein lies the difference between a list of ingredients and simple steps, and the details needed to cook something well. The demand for just the list without context is fine for those doggedly intent on learning nothing.

      • On a good site, hidden in those 15 pages of rubbish is often the "why". And therein lies the difference between a list of ingredients and simple steps, and the details needed to cook something well. The demand for just the list without context is fine for those doggedly intent on learning nothing.

        Indeed. But that why should be under the recipe not on top of it. You know, like it is in a traditional recipe book. The recipe is at the top, and the rest is at the bottom usually listed as notes.

        There is a wealth of good info on recipe sites. But you still need to skip through pop over advert rubbish, affiliate links to amazon which aren't even available in most of the world, and for 90% of recipes you don't need to the wealth of good info. Half of that good info is "I don't have X what can I substitute f

    • Not to mention that the majority of the recipes are FREAKING UNTESTED and only sort-of work. I will extend this to most cookery writing in the past forty years. The ones I KNOW work are pretty much anything by Marion Cunningham , who did a bunch of Fanny Farmer cookbook stuff, and pretty much anything from pre-1965 that's still around (earlier editions of the Fanny Farmer cookbook, Betty Crocker, and so on). Obviously there are likely way more cookbooks with well tested recipes - but having neither unlim
      • Oh yes, and everything by Julia Child was really well tested and delicious.
      • by jonwil ( 467024 )

        I trust any recipes from food brands I like (e.g. the pasta I buy has a bunch of recipes online or the supermarkets have recipes online), anything associated with a TV show (since if its connected to a TV show, it's at least been cooked and tasted on that show), anything from the Australian Woman's Weekly (I own a bunch of their cookbooks and no recipe from them has ever gone wrong for me), anything from SBS Food (almost certainly going to be from a TV show on the SBS Food channel and therefore tested), any

    • 100%, recipe "writers" delenda est

      I wish their servers melt to stone. A miserable pile of ads.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Recipes were mostly complete before the internet was even invented. I believe there from time to time something new and people may not have written about gummy bears on pizza before the internet, but when someone googles how to cook noodles, they could also have looked in grandma's cookbook.

    The "livelyhood of recipe writers" is here a nice word for making money by slightly changing an existing recipe and putting it on a clickbait site, making sure not even the Google snippet tells what someone is searching

    • Re:Ohhhhh! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bingoUV ( 1066850 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @06:50AM (#65868603)

      Recipes were mostly complete before the internet was even invented

      But the context around them has changed a lot. E.g.

      1. Newer devices have made it easier to do certain sorts of cooking, but it needs to modify the recipe ever so slightly for best results. E.g. Microwaves have become more common, air fryers.

      2. People doing 2 jobs in the last few decades are now not looking for BEST possible taste like the housewives of 1970s, but acceptable taste, hints at once a week meal prep work, and quick to make recipes.

      3. Availability of different types of partially cooked, precooked etc. ingredients has changed. Spam, corned beef, certain sauces that were common earlier has now given way to a much wider variety of intermediate food ingredients. These need to be explained in the newer recipes in a new way.

      4. Fusion. A lot more eastern spices are now available in the west, and western ones in the east. Many of them make sense in recipes from far away, if only one is ready for newer experiences. A recipe writer who has tried a few and suggests successful combination is far more important now than when the internet was invented in the 1950s.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I don't get air fryers. They are just fan ovens, but worse.

        • Re:Ohhhhh! (Score:5, Informative)

          by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:05AM (#65868621) Homepage

          They're ovens that are faster to preheat. Which shortens the cooking time of meals that are mostly pre-prepared, which is what most people eat (if you're preparing a meal from scratch, usually prep work takes up the preheating time)

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            But most of the air fryers in the UK are the wrong shape for pre-prepared meals, and most of those meals are best prepared with a microwave.

            It just seems like an air fryer is worse. Take potatoes or meat. You can pile them into an air fryer, or you can spread them in a fan oven and optionally have a rotating platter to make sure they cook evenly. I suppose it's true that the volume is lower so they heat up faster. More messy to clean though.

            • In the US with our 110v/1200w appliances the smaller size is more relevant than Europe with its higher voltage/wattage on a typical circuit.

              This impacts all countertop appliances in the US, our deep fryers are very small or don't really hole heat when being used for example.

              • You can get a full sized convection oven. You can also power a medium sized one from 110v@15A. When I was a teen we moved into a mobile with a lousy oven and my mother bought a DeLonghi countertop convection oven that plugged into a regular outlet. It cooked about as rapidly as any normal oven, and had capacity between one and a modern air fryer. Just enough for a turkey basically.

              • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                Ah, that makes sense. I do use a counter top fan oven that is about 1500W.

          • I have suspected one of the reasons why air fryers don't work for me, and maybe not for others, is what I don't buy - premade french fries, prebreaded chicken, prebreaded wings, and so on. I have found the results less than spectacular for chopped potatoes tossed in oil/sprayed with oil, than for packaged fries. I'm the outlier, not buying such things as preformed mashed potato with extra sugar and salt as a french fry. But others do and seem to get great results - good for them.
            • by Rei ( 128717 )

              Yeah, when thinking of the typical air fryer market, think "working mom with kids who wants to serve something nicer than a microwave dinner, but doesn't have the time for much prep or waiting". You can get those mailard reactions that microwaving doesn't really get you, nice crisping and browning of the surface that you normally get from an oven, without having to wait for an oven to preheat. I don't think anyone disputes that an oven will do a better job, but the air fryer does a better job than a micro

        • It's not the same thing, maybe it has something to do with the nature of the hot air convection inside. Things like fries come out way better in the air fryer than in a convection oven. Also, I find them very easy to clean. Just a quick go with the brush and some washing up liquid, done. The racks go into the dishwasher.
        • Yeah I got one thinking it'd be great - and it really mostly just dries stuff out. Thanks ordinary baking/roasting/etc. is fine for me. But , different people, different tastes.
      • E.g. Microwaves have become more common

        I've been winging it myself. I've not really found anywhere that makes more than surprisingly basic use of a microwave, so I've been experimenting on my own.

        • We tend toward the older on slashdot...but I remember when my mom got a microwave for the first time in the late 1970s she want to 'microwave cooking classes' at the place where they bought it, where a teacher showed how to make a roast, microwave a cake, fill ice cream cones with cake batter and microwave them, cook vegetables, and so on. Imagine doing something like that today!
          • I'm a bit younger also my parents had slight luddite tendencies, so we got a microwave in the 90s. It did come with its own cookbook. Mostly it was used as an adjunct, prepping parts like rice or veggies and so on.

            I spent about as much relatively recently (inflation adjusted) as that one cost as best as I could find, and you get a heck of a lot of microwave for that amount of money now! The one downside is this model is a bit spotty for microwave mug cakes because the duty cycle is a little obnoxiously long

    • Re:Ohhhhh! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mudimba ( 254750 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:07AM (#65868623)

      Yes, for a lot of dishes you can look to general purpose cookbooks (Joy of Cooking, or something like it). But a great part of the internet is that you can find regional dishes from all over the world. In fact, the very first thing I read when I got on the usenet in 1990 was from a recipe group.

      For example, my son has gotten really into watching Liverpool football. People from Liverpool are often called "scousers" based on a stew that is popular around there, so the last time they played I wanted to make my son some authentic scouse to eat while we watched the game. How am I supposed to get an authentic recipe for a regional dish when I live halfway around the world if I don't use the internet?

      When I went to find a recipe, most of the top results were indeed AI slop with all regional context removed. It's a stew, and a hundred locals will all cook it a different way - I want their stories of why they include the ingredients that they do, where the recipe comes from, etc. It was harder for me to find that then it was in 1990 when I was using usenet and a dialup modem.

    • Yeah i used a recipe cdrom off archive.org for a few years because this shit was so bad. It had videos and shit byt im sure there is an older floppy full of compressed text product out there that works on an AT if you want

  • by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @06:30AM (#65868567)
    ...classic recipe books by famous cooks (Bocuse, Escoffier, Artusi, ...) are cheap, often available in the public domain or at bargain shops. Reading and learning from these works is the best thing you can do. I personally recommend Bocuse's recipe book. Cooking is mostly about finding the right ingredients at the right time. Neither the youtuber living on the other emisphere nor AI can know about what is available at your local market (and I underline *market*, not supermarket, Amazon Fresh, or so).
    • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @08:54AM (#65868693)

      ...classic recipe books by famous cooks (Bocuse, Escoffier, Artusi, ...) are cheap, often available in the public domain or at bargain shops. Reading and learning from these works is the best thing you can do. I personally recommend Bocuse's recipe book. Cooking is mostly about finding the right ingredients at the right time. Neither the youtuber living on the other emisphere nor AI can know about what is available at your local market (and I underline *market*, not supermarket, Amazon Fresh, or so).

      You're either unemployed or childless or your kids moved out long ago or you have access to the world's greatest meth supply or learned the secret to surviving without sleep. No...almost no one can do what you're saying if they have a demanding job and young kids, like I do. I'm the family cook because my wife is a WASP and cooks like one. When we're getting real food and not whatever I could throw in the air fryer because fucking kids suck about trying most foods...it's not a patient endeavor done with love. Everything is rushed and I am interrupted often. The kitchen is rarely fully clean because even when we clean it, a kid makes a mess shortly after.

      I can't open a book, search through the pages, and place it carefully out of the way of splatter. I have a recipe manager (Paprika) with the recipes corrected for portions and allergies and tastes. I check my phone once or twice or maybe print it if it's confusing...so I don't give a shit what happens to the paper or if it gets splattered with something. For working parents who want to interact with our kids, we have to do whatever we can to be efficient with time...the recipe sites fail us...books are really inconvenient...We mostly need the ingredient ratios with a sentence or 2 explanation of what to do.

      And no, we can rarely cook in season. You're talking foodie level stuff...I'm happy for you that you can experience that.

      Many, if not most, of us are just trying to nourish our families in a way that doesn't make us feel ashamed of ourselves. TBH, there's so many things in life I prefer to eating. I'd rather cook and eat something nutritious as quickly as I can and get on with the day. For many of us, food is fuel. We can't avoid cooking, but we can do all we can to ensure everyone is eating healthy as efficiently as we can get by with.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Fuzi719 ( 1107665 )
        And that right there is answer #3472 to the question, "Why didn't you ever want children?" I enjoy my time in the kitchen making restaurant-quality meals for myself and my husband. I love flying business class all over the world for three-week vacations twice a year. I am so content in my beautifully designed home with resort-like backyard with pool and spa.
    • I own dozens of cook books from famous cooks that family members have purchased for me over the years... i have NEVER used a single one of them... im not searching y hand through multiple cookbooks to possibly find what i want..

      I have made my own cook book of recipes i have used and like. Printouts in page protectors in a binder. That gets used far more than any professionals cookbook. A simple google search brings up dozens if not more recipes that i can sift through for the right flavour profile i am loo

    • Well, that's just it. With AI recipes, I can say: "I have the following ingredients- please select a recipe." With a cookbook, I need to have a recipe in mind before going to the store and/or try to invent substitutions.

      That's not to say paper books are worthless, and they do often have a lot more content than just a recipe. There is certainly value to understanding general cooking principles. But you aren't "wasting your time" using the internet.

  • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @06:50AM (#65868601) Homepage

    Hi lovelies! Welcome back to my little corner of the comment section! I am so incredibly excited to share this comment with you today. It is a family favorite, passed down through generations of posters, and it is honestly a total game-changer for weeknight reading. But before we get to the actual text of my opinion on this article, I just have to share a little story about my journey with digital content.

    [ JUMP TO COMMENT ] (Link does not work)

    It was a crisp autumn morning in 1998. The leaves were turning that beautiful shade of red, and the sound of dial-up modems was in the air. My grandmother (rest in peace, Nana!) used to sit me on her knee and say, "Sweetie, one day you’re going to read an article about Artificial Intelligence scraping content, and you’re going to need the perfect text-based response to go with it." She was so right.

    I remember the way the sunlight hit the CRT monitor—it’s an unforgettable memory for me. Just like the way the aroma of roasting garlic fills a kitchen, the warmth of a flame war fills the soul. My hubby, who is a huge tech enthusiast (and my biggest taste-tester!), always says that the key to a good comment is the texture. You want it to be crunchy on the outside but soft and savory on the inside.

    Why You Will LOVE This Comment

    It’s 100% Organic: No LLMs were used in the making of this opinion!
    Quick & Easy: Once you scroll past 4,000 words, it takes seconds to read!
    Kid-Friendly: My kiddos beg for this comment every Tuesday night!
    Freezer Friendly: You can save this HTML and reheat it for later debates.

    I know what you're thinking. "User:Rei, do I really need another opinion on copyright law and the extinction of the ad-supported web?" Trust me, you do. This isn't just any opinion. This is a curated opinion. ... [Subscribe to my Newsletter to remove ads] ...

    The Secret Ingredient

    A lot of people think the secret to a good Slashdot post is the insight. But actually? It’s the SEO optimization. When I went to Tuscany last summer to study under a master poster, I learned that the old ways are the best. We hand-kneaded our sentences for hours. It was exhausting, but so rewarding. It really made me appreciate the artisanal nature of the internet before Google's AI started making "Frankenstein" summaries.

    Speaking of Frankenstein, isn't it funny how Mary Shelley really understood the human condition? Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment that involved putting it together with different body parts. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18 and staying in Bath,[2] and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.

    Shelley travelled through Europe in 1815, moving along the river Rhine in Germany, and stopping in Gernsheim, 17 kilometres (11 mi) away from Frankenstein Castle, where, about a century earlier, Johann Konrad Dippel, an alchemist, had engaged in experiments.[3][4][5] She then journeyed to the region of Geneva, Switzerland, where much of the story takes place. Galvanism and occult ideas were topics of conversation for her companions, particularly for her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley.

    In 1816 —at the suggestion of Lord Byron— Mary, Percy, John Polidori and Byron himself, each agreed to try writing a ghost story.[6] After thinking for days, Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein after imagining a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made.[7] The novel was first published anonymously in 1818, and in 1831, a revised edition was published under Mary Shelley's name. This version included significant stylistic revisions, a new preface describing the story's conception, and a more explicitly mo

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Thanks, I needed a good laugh this morning. You win at least three Internets for this.
    • Outstanding!
  • Many jobs are getting wiped out, not just recipe creators
    • 'Recipe creator' is not a job. 'Cook' is a job. 'Chef' is a job. 'Cook book writer' is a job, er well, until the AI consumed it and posted it on the google front page copyright be damned.
  • by Anonymous Cward ( 10374574 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:07AM (#65868625)
    If users are able to get a better result from an automated summary than they are from reading your website, it is not the summarisation tool that is the problem, it is your website. The Internet is fundamentally a data sharing and/or retrieval tool and the World Wide Web was intended to be no different. Instead of making your website look like a shop window art deco fluff piece, maybe consider offering users a plain, bare-bones set of informative pages with a decent summary instead.

    As far as ads go, that is a dead revenue source and has been for a long time. Either run your website as a hobby or do not run it at all. Expecting to be paid for supplying information when most of the world has long agreed information should be free, is peak stupidity.

    The real reason many people are against these cloud-based LLMs is because of the centralised control over information which large corporations cannot be trusted to use properly, and nothing more. It is a very good reason, one we should be shouting from the rooftops about to make sure decent alternatives always exist, but such a reason will not get you paid. The tech bros are in the wrong, but they are not wrong when they say what they say. Mustafa Suleyman is an asshole but he is not wrong when he essentially says that once something is on the public Internet, people will be accessing and using it for free.
    • this is a stupid take that completely misses the point. no matter how "good" (by whatever your perception of "good" is), people won't visit the website because their main driver of traffic (Google) is simply hiding them.

      google puts their AI crap in the most valuable space of the results page. on mobile you even have to scroll down to see actual search results

      Microsoft got fined for antitrust for bundling a web browser. google gets away with stealing content to train LLMs and used their golden results page s

      • by znrt ( 2424692 )

        this is a stupid take that completely misses the point. no matter how "good" (by whatever your perception of "good" is), people won't visit the website because their main driver of traffic (Google) is simply hiding them.

        hiding is a strong word here ...

        the most valuable space of the results page.

        this is actually the point nobody is speaking about. is scrolling down for something you are actively looking for really so fucking hard? we've had roughly 30 years to teach the population some basic information era literacy and all we've done is competing for that tiny "valuable space" in their tiny screens and minds, for who is most efficient at keeping people dumb and recourseless, for who comes up with the cheapest tricks to get immediate attention. well, here are some su

        • I gotta agree with this take...

          As an old-school web developer, one of the things that the website must, absolutely, do, is be more convenient than the alternatives.

          The AI summary is quick, available at the top level, and is of inferior quality. Scrolling by it, if it's not what you want, is trivial. We've scrolled by sponsored links at the top of search results for decades.

          The website article contains a lot more friction: Getting past the ads and the narrative schlock to get to the actual recipe. It's far m

          • The website can NEVER be more convenient than not going to the website after Google gives you the answer without going there. No website can and it's why Google should not be allowed to do its little summary games. There is no way to do them fairly.

            • I disagree. Some sites, like allrecipes, are better than the Google summary. I'd much rather have thorough content that is convenient to access, then impartial content, but I would prefer impartial content over thorough content that is a pain in the ass to access

      • by allo ( 1728082 )

        Rule of thumb: If a summary on the Google page can replace it, it is probably nothing that should be worth monetizing on a website. And adding a lot of fluff to the website to make the article seem worthier is the opposite of what you should do, people prefer the summary *because* your actual content is hidden under a lot of fluff.

    • Either run your website as a hobby or do not run it at all. Expecting to be paid for supplying information when most of the world has long agreed information should be free, is peak stupidity.

      Either play in your band as a hobby or do not play at all. Expecting to be paid for your performance when most of the world has long agreed information should be free, is peak stupidity.
      • by tragedy ( 27079 )

        Either play in your band as a hobby or do not play at all. Expecting to be paid for your performance when most of the world has long agreed information should be free, is peak stupidity.

        The relevant part of that is that Google and the other AI companies do not believe and do not agree that information should be free. They want to be the gatekeepers to information and make a profit off that gatekeeping. The problem of course is that there is no real business model for this kind of application of AI (aside from pumping up stock prices, which may do wonders for C-suite compensation, but still is not a business model). I mean, how does it work:
        1. Scrape websites for data people are looking for

  • There's that old meme out there comparing a DVD to a pirated movie where the pirated version is just the movie compared to all the trailers, menus, ads and anti piracy warnings. This is the same thing for websites with AI. I notice i don't go to Wikihow anymore due to the fact that AI just summarises it as well. I feel that eventually the original Berners-Lee idea of the "web" will be replaced by just an all in one "AI-terminal interface". It's a "bad ending", future, but there's countless amounts of money
  • by Revek ( 133289 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:48AM (#65868649)
    I hate recipe sites. As a result I don't care about their livelihood. I've taken in the last five years to buying cookbooks at flea markets and used book shops. There are few used book shops still around but occasionally I get one of those regional home published cookbooks with really great concise instructions that I don't have to read through a wall of garbage to get.
    • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @08:15AM (#65868667) Journal

      I hate recipe sites.

      You do realise what they said applies to basically every category of site? Google want to feed you their own rehashed version of other people's works so you will stay with google, seeing google's ads and google gets to keep everything.

      No one is going to produce anything to anonymously feed google's bottom line. If they keep this up it will destroy the best of the internet.

      • Google want to feed you their own rehashed version of other people's works so you will stay with google

        It's too bad they are so terrible at it. What they shit out is usually wrong, and the citation links almost never are an actual citation.

        • They are. The trouble is that something really shitty pushed hard by a dominant player can destroy something much much better. Enshittification in action :(

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        You do realise what they said applies to basically every category of site? Google want to feed you their own rehashed version of other people's works so you will stay with google, seeing google's ads and google gets to keep everything.

        No one is going to produce anything to anonymously feed google's bottom line. If they keep this up it will destroy the best of the internet.

        Except recipe sites are some of the worst. They show a nice picture of the food, OK, great. Then you get the author's life story as to ho

    • by dargaud ( 518470 )
      Just go around a bit, there are several that I like, with no video, no sound, only one picture of the result, one one short intro chapter and no gimmicks. But yeah, several of the top search engine results are horrendous and the ones I like are usually in the top 10, but sometimes way below.
    • You know who enshittified recipe sites?

      Google did.

      Google is why most contain a massive story about how the author once baked this delicious recipe based on Deliah Smith's method while on vacation in Tahiti using only the freshest oak leaves and... {continued for another mile of scrollable text}. Because real recipes are short, it became impossible to get any traffic at all with a straightforward "Here's roughly what it tastes like, here's how you make it" site. There was no reason for Google to do this, bey

  • I thought it was just me as ChatGPT assured me that this dish would be awesome.

  • Sure, I think that some sites should just fuck off and die. All Recipes and the like are good examples. Anything that just warehouses user submitted works, or that bubble recipes up and down based on likes and dislikes. "I made it, but instead of whole milk I used almond milk, half the salt, used ginger instead of galongal, and didn't process the lemongrass. Didn't like it. One star, would not make again." You shouldn't get a vote, numbnuts.

    I also believe in the value and tangibility of the physical cookboo

    • by allo ( 1728082 )

      But is the site you trust dying? You just named it. I bet you have a bookmark or type in a URL and don't have to search for it. Some people here may not have searched for it and read the site because you recommended it.
      Probably that site is not dying, but only the thousand homepage-kit sites that just farm ad clicks are dying. The best thing you can do against generic automated content is to provide content that is not generic and not easy to automate.

      And with building reputation you also have the Netflix/S

  • Gets what they deserve when its done.... i dont know why someone would use AI for a food recipe...

  • Way before: you open a recipe book and search for chocolate chip cookies.
    Ingredients:
    1 cup of sugar
    2 cups of flour ...

    Before: you open a browser and Google chocolate chip cookies.
    Ingredients:
    1

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      I'm sure that serving you a lot of ads is the point of the excessive length of internet recipes, but there's another reason, too. A simple list of ingredients, or a list of instructions (like how to build Ikea furniture) cannot be copyrighted. I think many of these overly verbose recipe authors really do want to make it appear that their own takes on the recipes are distinct and innovative, and that helps them secure their own content from being scraped wholesale. But of course, AI just says, "fuck it, I ca

  • This has been Google's M.O. for many years now. Scrape creator's content, then cut them out. They do this with images/photography, news, recipes -- anything they can throw an ad in front of... Google is DESTROYING original content. Plain and simple.
  • by mseeger ( 40923 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @12:07PM (#65869133)

    Most recipes (90+%) on the internet illustrate only two things: the author can neither cook nor write recipes.

    Don't get me wrong: there are excellent recipes to be found. But it takes quite some effort to find them before being bludgeoned to death by ads.

  • Recipes are not copyrightable, and they have traditionally been shared freely. And when the internet came along, cooking recipes were one of the first things to be shared, I think even before the web existed.

    Some people make a living editing them, giving them a nice presentation, that part is copyrightable and that's the value added, the recipe is not. Many recipe websites are terrible enough to make the added value negative, pages of useless content and ads. AI rights this wrong in a sense, if the experien

  • We had recipes, and food sites, and cooking shows before the web was all about advertising revenue. We will still have these things when the era of making a living by farming ads on your blog has passed.

    AI synthesized blogs/videos are a cheap and easy way to farm advertising revenue, but they will have a short lifespan as they are a race to the bottom.

    Find a another way to make a living. If you love posting this stuff, keep doing it -but don't expect to earn a living at it.

  • I had chatgpt concoct me a recipe. It turned out pretty bad.

  • by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @04:15PM (#65869733) Homepage
    So now they have to find a real job?
  • We have enough recipes.

  • Well, those following LLM recipes deserve everything they will eat.

    LLMs can help as a fuzzy search, to find good, human sources. But anyone not seeing the problem in letting them come up with a recipe shows an utter lack of understanding about how these things work. It's beyond me why anyone would want to follow a recipe that hasn't been developed and repeatedly cooked by an entity with hands, a kitchen, tastebuds and a digestive system.

Real programs don't eat cache.

Working...