How refreshing to hear there’s another thing that Artificial Intelligence can’t do right! And how gratified I am – and you recipe tinkerers out there should be – that AI is nowhere close to displacing humans in the recipe creation sector!
A ‘glamour’ shot of the alleged result of following a recipe at DessertsPro.com. Source
post author Brenda Goodman alleges the photo – like the recipe – is AI-Generated…
Once upon a time…
… Noted baking blogger Brenda Goodman saw a photo of a Christmas sweet treat she just couldn’t resist. And decided, then and there, to try the recipe.
That’s when the storm clouds of chaos began gather…
In her own words…
“It started with the cutest little desserts: chocolate acorns with nut-covered caps that popped up in my search for Thanksgiving cookies on Pinterest, a site I visit for inspiration and some step-by-step instructions. ‘Who wouldn’t love these things?’ I thought…”
“The recipe said you could whip up a batch in 45 minutes. I splurged and bought my favorite Lindt chocolate bars to make them.
“It ended at 1 am, after about five hours of effort – including an emergency run to the grocery store for a missing ingredient – with parchment-covered baking sheets spread across my kitchen, holding misshapen globs of chocolate-dunked peanut butter sandwich cookies that didn’t come close to resembling acorns.
“Despite my many attempts at adjusting the temperature of the chocolate and MacGyvering the cookies — I cut them, stacked them and stuck them together with chocolate — they just could not match the acorns in the photo.”
Post mortem…
“It dawned on me: Could this recipe have been generated by AI? Had I been had?
She began to see the clues that been right in front of her all the time – had she been looking for them…
“Even as I had been reading through the instructions, I kept wondering how the blogger got the Nutter Butter cookies — which are flat, with a peanut-like curved shape — to turn into the nice rounded shape of the acorns. The recipe recommends holding the cookies by the pointier end ‘to create the more natural-looking’ acorn”
“They’re ridiculously cute, surprisingly simple, and honestly? They’ve become the most photographed dessert at every family gathering I bring them to,” gushed food blogger Anna Kelly described as a professionally trained pastry chef. “My sister-in-law now requests them specifically, and I’ve made them at least twelve times since I first stumbled upon the idea three years ago.”
Anything there sound fishy to you?
Obvious signals
The continuity gap between the flat cookies and the conical acorn shapes is a dead giveaway that either a) the recipe author was grossly negligent, excluding essential points in her instructions, or b) ‘she’ had never actually tried to make her own recipe!
And I immediately glomed onto the too-perfect fakeness of the name ‘Anna Kelly’. It has the same made-up ring to it as ‘Betty Crocker’ and ‘Ronald McDonald’.
Goodman turned detective, and quickly discovered that ‘Anna Kelly’ was also the purported author of another recipe blog, MuffinIdeas.com. Anna’s ‘bio’ blurb there was an almost word-for-word copy of the one at DessertsPro. Except that it claimed she had been ‘self-taught’, rather than ‘professionally trained’.
To cap off the ‘fake’ diagnosis… E-mails to both websites came back ‘undeliverable’.
The pros weigh in…
“This site is almost certainly AI,” said Adam Gallagher, who runs the food blog Inspired Taste, which he started with his wife, Joanne, in 2009.
“It’s not that artificial intelligence, as a tool, is necessarily a bad thing,” said Tom Critchlow, executive vice president for Audience Growth at Raptive, a company that helps bloggers and other creators monetize their content. “It would be one thing, maybe, for a real chef or food blogger to use some AI to help refine their writing or get new ideas.”
“But that’s not what’s happening here,” Critchlow emphasized.
My take
SO… Let Brenda’s run-in with AI recipe-writing be a lesson to all of us. Critchlow says AI is infiltrating all media platforms. No no source is save from contamination.
My dear, departed Dad had a rule when cutting a piece of wood: “Measure twice, cut once.” I say: “Read the recipe twice – or even three times, if you need to – before trying to make it…
~ Maggie J.
The Image at the top of this page is an AI-Generated fake. Facebook member Recipe Girl reports: “I asked ChatGPT to generate a photo of Bacon Cheeseburger Alfredo Lasagna with gooey, dripping cheese. It’s not a real recipe. Just wanted to share how these fake sites are generating the photos, and then they ask it to generate a (fake) recipe to go with it!”