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.
