AI slop recipes are taking over the Internet - and Thanksgiving dinner

Recipe bloggers like Gargano said it’s the first holiday season where consumers are starting to trust AI answers in search and chatbots, as well as recipe content remixed by AI, which can be hard to distinguish from the real thing. — Pixabay

Eb Gargano has been writing recipes online long enough to anticipate the seasonal rhythms of her web traffic. The Easy Peasy Foodie creator can predict when US readers begin searching for her stress-free turkey instructions, or when her Christmas cake will start its annual climb up Google search results.

This year, those familiar patterns are breaking. Instead of sending home cooks to her decade-old, well-tested recipes, Google increasingly inserts AI-generated summaries stitched together from bits of her work and others’ that often get the basics wrong. An AI-assembled version of Gargano’s Christmas cake, for instance, would have people cooking a 6in cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F (160°C).