It’s an abomination in so many ways – I gave up counting. It’s the story of a ‘history’ ‘channel’ that manufactured its content – writers, photos and whole recipes – using AI. The Hungry Historian was more heresy than heritage…
Imagine thinking you could get away with something like that! But one purported ‘authentic soul food’ You Tube channel had been fooling everyone for months.
Enter: The sleuth…
Soul Food Project podcast host Ian Yusuf was tipped to The Hungry Historian by an older relative who had come across it – and was impressed.
Yusuf, himself, is black, and has soul food in his blood. He was anxious to check out the channel. But as soon as he saw the thumbnails on the index page, he smelled a rat.
The video titles seemed off to him, he told TODAY: “[I]felt something off about the titles, like ‘Big Mama vs Betty Crocker: 25 Dishes No Cookbook Ever Printed’, as well as captions attempting African American Vernacular English (AAVE), like, ‘preacher came we ate good’ or ‘big mama tricks’.”
“Everything on the channel aimed to highlight the culinary heritage of Black Americans — without using a single real person to do so,” Joseph Lamour, who wrote the TODAY story, summed up.
Indisputable proof
Yusuf then subjected samples of the channel’s work to AI image and video detectors ZeroGPT and DeepAI. And quickly confirmed that much of the content was AI-generated, “including the thumbnails of elderly Black women, the ‘archival’ clips in each video, and even the main voiceovers.”
Yikes!
ElevenLabs’s AI Speech Classifier, confirmed that video voiceover narrations wee using its ‘Attank’ voice synthesizer, which is described as a “middle-aged Male with African accent.”
Double yikes!
Out and out fraud?
Okay. The channel wasn’t taking money from its subscribers. But it was earning bags of cash from the ads inserted by You Tube. Just to be safe… Let’s amend that original characterization from ‘fraud’ to ‘deception’.
But it’s mega-deception!
The official You Tube channel description digs the bona fides of The Hungry Historian so deep into a moral and ethical hole the folks behind it can’t see out:
“We tell African American history through the food that carried it: Sunday dinners, church suppers, Juneteenth tables, and the everyday cooking that became some of the best this country has ever known. Black cooks built the backbone of American cuisine and rarely got the credit. Families carried these traditions out of the South and rebuilt them in Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit.”
But the backbone is AI, the families are fake, and the Black cooks never lifted a spatula.
A matter of honour
YouTuber and filmmaker Cam James helped Yusuf trace the provenance of The Hungry Historian.
“I do every aspect of the videos I make: I write, I film, I edit, I even make the thumbnails,” James said. “[AI] is direct theft from artists like me who do all the work ourselves.”
It turned out the channel was owned by a ‘media’ company located in Cyprus. The company never responded to multiple e-mail inquiries.
You Tube speaks
You Tube brass was quick to act after learning that the channel was ‘AI slop’: “We suspended the channel in question from our Partner Program, which means it’s ineligible to earn money from ads on YouTube,” a You Tube representative told TODAY.
Curiously, You Tube has a hard and fast rule against impersonating real people. But no rule against impersonating a whole race. AI tears up the rule book, again.
You Tube is particularly prickly about AIslop these days. A November 2025 Kapwing study found 21 to 33 percent of YouTube’s feed may be AI slop or brainrot videos.
My take
Amid the controversy, The Hungry Historian was quietly renamed ‘Potlikker‘*. But it’s still running, full bore.
I wonder how many more You Tube channels are composed mainly or entirely of AI slop? I’ll bet the number is greater than even the most pessimistic of us fear.
Meanwhile, I can’t help recalling the plague of AI cookbooks that was unmasked last Fall, by intrepid investigators… It’s an epidemic!
~ Maggie J.
***
* ‘Potlikker’ is the broth left over after, “boiling green leafy vegetables such as collards, turnip greens, mustard greens, cabbage, or kale with pork fat, salt, and pepper. It was a staple of enslaved people in the South, often eaten along with baked or fried cornbread, either dipped or crumbled into the pot-likker. By the early 1850s, potlikker was a mainstay in Southern diets.”
I need to do a post on this! Stay tuned…