IYAM, AI is bound to ruin almost everything we hold dear. Makes me wish I were even older than I already am.
A glimmer of hope: “According to the market research firm Circana (formerly BookScan), sales of baking cookbooks are up 80% this year”, then back to reality: “…but other areas have been relatively flat.”
AI can consolidate and blend online recipes and from scanned books and that might work sometimes but AI can’t replace taste or visual queues, or verify a recipe actually works. That requires humans. For relatively simple stuff I’m sure AI can do okay, get close, but I have doubts about complex recipes with multiple layers of prep, non-standard ingredients or really old school prep.
Big operations and cookbook publishers test and verify recipes because if it’s screwed up, people don’t come back or buy cookbooks or subscriptions. AI can’t replace tasting actual food or eye-balling results, or recipe testing, so that’s a few saving graces.
There’s going to be some kind of AI disruption and online recipes but stuff like cookbook sales jumping says something. AI can do a lot o things but not being able to taste or look at food is a big deal that I don’t think it can bridge.
one of the many reasons i’ve turned it off.
it’s not hard to use a non-AI enabled browser. i use a number of browsers for development, but Chrome is useful for a number of things i do with my personal accounts. thankfully the AI search can be turned off with little effort @ https://labs.google.com/search/manage?authuser=0&source=ntp
i doubt most will got through the minimal effort.
i doubt most will got through the minimal effort.
Done!
ETA I find problems with AI answers about half the time it’s been turned on on a Google search, but usually it’s because I already know something about the answer.
Evolve and adapt, or die.
I have the feeling we will make it through this somehow.
I feel like the recipe blog scene largely did this to itself. Only a tiny fraction of blogs produce trustworthy content – recipes that are actually created and tested by the author or site. I can count on one hand the number of sites I’ve visited lots of times and actually trust. Most of the time if I google for something I’ll get the same recipe on 20 random photo-heavy blogs, each accompanied by dozens of five star reviews praising “how good it looks.” (No one has actually tried making the thing.) It’s beautiful food porn, not a recipe. At best, a roll of the dice. Further, most of the recipe type content, good and bad, has now moved to YouTube. There’s very little actual text being produced these days.
So now we have a lot of old, mostly low quality text being sucked up by AI and regurgitated, and we should feel bad for bloggers losing ad revenue because people are using a summary instead of wading through the crap? If people searching for content expected and wanted viable content, they would skip the AI version and go below it. But they’ve been well trained at this point; this is a case of people speaking rather loudly through their clickstream. So, as said above, this is a simple case of adapt or die, and in most cases the adaptation – to video – already should have happened years ago.
OTOH, it’s not only the recipe bloggers who are affected. AI has made it much harder for this human to find what she needs online. I used to be able to cull through recipe search results quickly to find sources that I considered credible. Now AI seems to be serving me slop.
Also, it seems like the useful results I used to be able to find quickly are not being presented to me by the search engine at all. Perhaps I need to stop using Google, given that its increasing AI usage appears to be degrading the search quality that I experience as a user. A shame to lose that convenience.
Speaking of crap, why do most of the bloggers (even ones I like) all have the same platform/format with all the auto-run ads?
And lately, despite the little advert boxes having a pause button and/or a click-to-close “x”, neither seem to work. The ads just keep spinning on, on many of them (thankfully not the ones I most often frequent).
Recipe sites are a small part of it. Web search traffic declined by something like 15 percent last year, and sites that depend heavily on ad revenue rather than paid subscriptions were hit hard. I saw people who lost staff positions twice in the same year, because the not-great-but-gotta-pay-the-rent job they took in April was eliminated by October. If it hasn’t affected anything you read online yet, it will.
It doesn’t really matter if AI is good at what it does or not. It matters if the person making the relevant decisions can tell the difference or gives a shit. Just in my line of sight I’m seeing captioning and copy editing job postings turn into “correct the AI’s work” postings at a fraction of the fee. My sister’s been a professional illustrator for decades, and clients are happy to just use some AI-generated junk now, even the ones who hadn’t already peeled away because they just downloaded something to use from the internet. Of course it’s terrible, but they do it for the same reason I stayed on dial-up internet in college instead of paying for cable: shitty-but-free is really compelling!
not so sure about that . . . if one simply ignores the garbage A.I. throws up, all the found-links are still there and presented.
A.I. is incredibly, irresponsibly “over rated / over touted.” it’s not soup yet, and it’ll will be many many years-to-decades before A.I. can be trusted, for anything.
That really depends how you use it - many companied in different industries use AI platforms which are based on internal data and so they can very strictly control the data quality - in those cases AI can be extremely powerful (ultimately the impact of AI always depends on the data quality -garbage in - garbage out
Just search without AI “support”
Try DuckDuckGo.
Just use Brave Browser. You’ll quickly forget that ads even exist.
And how!
Agree 100% that it’s overrated. But can it be trusted for something? Absolutely, if you know what you’re doing and put appropriate safeguards in place. I’ve built two different AI-based workflow systems in my day job. They work great – much faster and more accurate than humans. Which doesn’t mean that I trust a random Gemini search to give me the right answer on just about anything…
Add -AI to your search query. You’ll get (mostly, it’s not perfect) non-AI results.
