According to The Verge, AI-generated recipes are creating culinary disasters while devastating food blogger traffic. Recipe blogger Eb Gargano discovered AI remixes of her Christmas cake that would bake a 6-inch cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F, creating charcoal instead of dessert. Meanwhile, her turkey recipe traffic has already plunged 40% year over year. Home cooks are wasting time and money following AI recipes that promise cookies but deliver melted pools of cloyingly sweet dough. The problem stems from both AI-generated images attached to nonsense recipes and Google AI Overview remixes of actual recipes that are flooding search results.
The human cost of AI slop
Here’s the thing – this isn’t just about bad recipes. For food bloggers, this is their livelihood getting crushed. We’re talking about people who’ve spent years building expertise, testing recipes, and creating communities. Now AI systems are essentially scraping their hard work, remixing it into garbage, and ranking above the original sources. And Google‘s pushing this stuff through AI Overviews? That’s basically handing the keys to content farms while the actual creators starve.
Why AI can’t cook
Look, AI doesn’t understand food. It doesn’t know that baking a small cake for four hours turns it into charcoal. It can’t taste whether something is cloyingly sweet or perfectly balanced. These systems are pattern matchers, not chefs. They’re remixing ingredients and instructions without any understanding of chemistry, physics, or flavor. So we get recipes that look plausible on paper but create disasters in the kitchen.
The search quality crisis
What’s really concerning is how quickly this is degrading search quality. Remember when Google search actually helped you find reliable information? Now we’re getting AI hallucinations presented as facts. For recipe searches, this isn’t just inconvenient – people are wasting real money on ingredients and time preparing inedible food. And the bloggers who could actually help are buried under AI-generated slop.
What happens to cooking content?
I worry we’re heading toward a future where reliable recipe sources get pushed out entirely. If traffic keeps dropping 40% year over year, how long can these bloggers survive? The irony is that AI needs human-created content to train on, but it’s actively destroying the ecosystem that produces that content. Basically, we’re killing the golden goose to serve up slop. Where does that leave home cooks who actually want to make edible food?
