AI Recipe 'Slop' Threatens Thanksgiving Traditions as Food Bloggers Face Traffic Collapse

AI Is Transforming Thanksgiving Meals, Memories and Family Traditions

As AI slips into kitchens, conversations and memories, Thanksgiving has become a test of how much we're willing to outsource Tom, the turkey in Google's new commercial, is a plush -- the kind of stuffed animal you might find on a couch. To dodge Thanksgiving, he asks Google's "AI Mode" to point him to a destination where the holiday doesn't exist. The 30-second ad isn't just about AI; it's by AI -- the first Google commercial made entirely with its AI-generation systems to be released on TV. Tom may be a cartoon, but he lands close to the mood right now. This year many Thanksgiving choices -- what ends up in the oven, how much families spend, how the day gets remembered -- may be influenced by artificial intelligence. I'm not talking about a few tech-savvy hosts who have ChatGPT concoct a pumpkin pie recipe. A recent survey by software company Qlik found that 54 percent of respondents said they'd used AI to help plan, prep or cook a holiday meal. Among younger adults, the number was at 58 percent, but even a quarter of baby boomers reported doing so. About a third of people said they would rely more on AI than on family members to make a grocery list for Thanksgiving. Part of the motivation is saving money -- over half trusted AI to lower costs. AI can hunt for deals, compare brands and find items within a proposed budget while taking into consideration guest counts and dietary restrictions. Sometimes bots place your order online; sometimes they tell you which nearby store has the cheapest boxed stuffing. If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. AI is starting to sound like another kitchen appliance -- which themselves are becoming more algorithmic, capable of recognizing the food you want to cook and adjusting temperature and timing appropriately. Some even learn your preferences. Humans still control these tools, but the judgment usually reserved for experienced cooks seems to be shifting to machines. Future Thanksgivings may require no human cooks at all. AI is also changing how we communicate. With so little free time and so much pressure to be perfect, many who've never cooked a turkey might have a chatbot walk them through the steps, feeling safer asking "stupid questions" in private. People even report using AI conversation prompts to get lively discussions going at the table. AI can generate the toast, the prayer, the party games and the poem read before dessert. It may even transform our memories. Platforms promote "Thanksgiving Dinner Portrait" image effects, transforming photos into banquet scenes with warm light and a perfectly styled table. Other presets promise golden‑hour Thanksgiving outdoors. Some sites advertise AI Thanksgiving image generators for greeting cards and seasonal marketing. In effects galleries, cozy Thanksgiving‑kitchen filters can sit next to AI boyfriend or girlfriend generators. A smiling partner or extra guest can be conjured as easily as a pumpkin pie. With 72 percent of teenagers having used AI for companionship, one might slip away from the table to vent to a bot about a tense political debate. A young adult might message an AI "partner" when family questions about dating get invasive. The outlet might be helpful, or it might replace the work of maintaining relationships with the humans passing the mashed potatoes. So is this our first AI Thanksgiving? In one sense, no. Global and national food systems have been computerized for decades, and grocery chains began using algorithms for logistics and pricing long before we heard the phrase "generative AI." We all depend on algorithms for weather forecasts, route planning, flight bookings and online orders. In another sense, the answer might be yes. For many, this may be the first holiday in which AI helps decide what goes on the table, what we say and how we appear to others. Or maybe we're asking the wrong question, and this isn't our first AI Thanksgiving -- it's theirs. All our searches for cranberry sauce and gluten-free stuffing -- every filtered photo, every venting session with a chatbot -- are the real harvest: data from millions of homes, millions of side dishes, millions of negotiations about where to sit and what to say. We can easily imagine, in the years ahead, someone setting a seat for a tablet or robot and asking what it's thankful for. If its answer is convincing, it will be because AI is already at our table, studying our messy ways. Though unsettling, the prospect is also an invitation. If we're going to be written into code, we can decide what AI sees. We can let it record an optimized, robotic evening, or we can leave glitches: embarrassing toasts, typical disagreements and spontaneous jokes. That way, when future models tell us about Thanksgiving, they will respond that a successful holiday can look a little broken.

AI is serving up recipes for literal slop and crushing food bloggers.

AI-generated images of food attached to nonsense recipes and Google AI Overview remixes of actual recipes are taking a huge toll on traffic for recipe bloggers. But home cooks are also wasting time and money following recipes that claim to be for cookies but only yield melted pools of cloyingly sweet dough. According to Bloomberg: An AI-assembled version of [Eb] Gargano's Christmas cake, for instance, would have people cooking a 6-inch cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F (160°C). "You'd end up with charcoal!" she said. Meanwhile, traffic to her turkey recipe is already down 40% year over year.

A New Way to Ruin Thanksgiving: Making AI Slop Recipes

Remember when people started asking AI tools for cooking advice, and it wound up telling them to do things like use glue to get cheese to stick on pizza? Well, people are apparently relying on that same technology to guide them through cooking this year's Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, so many are doing so that Bloomberg reports it's putting a real dent in the views of recipe writers who usually see traffic spike this time of year. The problem is effectively the same one that led to Google previously recommending that people eat one rock per day: AI Overviews in Search. They provide users with a quick panel that pulls out all of the "relevant information" without requiring them to click through to a website and scroll through the admittedly annoying 2,000-word personal essay that precedes every recipe ever posted online. This creates two issues. The first is for the recipe authors, who have put actual workâ€"from their collected knowledge of food to the effort of prep work to the trial and error to get the final product just rightâ€"into the recipes they share. They're getting their traffic siphoned off by the AI Overviews. Creators that Bloomberg spoke with said their traffic was down between 40% to 80% this year from previous Thanksgivings. That's in line with the experience of other sites, too, which have reported as much as 80% declines in click-throughs since AI Overviews became more prominent. The second problem is for people making the recipes, because there is a very real chance that they are getting bad information. Here's the thing about AI summaries of anything: it doesn't actually understand what it is reading. All it can do is spit back what it thinks is relevant. That's kind of a big deal for cooking, where little errors can ruin a dish. For instance, Bloomberg talked to one cook who has a popular Christmas cake recipe. On the creator's page for the recipe, it suggests baking it at 160°C (that's 320°F) for an hour and a half. An AI-summarized version of that recipe recommends you bake it for three to four hoursâ€"more than twice as long. You don't have to know a whole lot about backing to know that's not going to turn out great. AI-generated recipes have become a whole micro-industry. If you hop on any social platform and go looking for ideas of what to cook, there's a good chance you'll land on a page that looks like your standard cooking inspiration fareâ€"but you might notice that the recipes just aren't quite right. Best-case scenario, you'll probably end up with a relatively bland but perfectly fine dish. Worst case, you might end up burning down your house because somewhere in the black hole that is a large language model, it decided that you should put your tinfoil-wrapped fish in the microwave on high. Maybe grab one of those old cookbooks off the shelf this holiday season just to be safe.

AI slop recipes are taking over the internet -- and Thanksgiving dinner | Fortune

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 6-inch cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F (160°C). "You'd end up with charcoal!" she said. Meanwhile, traffic to her turkey recipe is already down 40% year over year. 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. That's not just bad for business; it's potentially ruinous for a holiday dinner table if home cooks, inspired by pretty AI-generated photos, try recipes that turn out unappetizing or that defy the laws of chemistry. In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated "recipe slop" is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money. Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won't achieve; Google's AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people's feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue. All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. "No matter how clever the AI is," she said in a recent interview, "it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works." Food blog traffic can vary wildly by niche, platform, audience and even season. But AI slop is everywhere. Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack, the 15-year author of the Mexican food blog Muy Bueno, recently warned her more than 190,000 Facebook followers. Earlier this month, she posted two AI-generated tamale photos: one with sauce poured over the husks, and another showing tamales lying flat in a steamer. Both, she wrote, were obvious mistakes. The husks aren't meant to be eaten; you remove them before adding sauce. And tamales should steam upright so the masa cooks evenly. "Little details like this are big red flags," she told readers. "When you search for recipes, make sure they come from trusted human cooks who actually test their food." The issue hit home last Christmas when her husband wanted to try a recipe on Facebook for maraschino cherry chocolate chip cookies -- from a post that didn't seem to have a human author or source. Marquez-Sharpnack said she was suspicious of the photos, in which the cookies were a little too perfectly pink. But her husband trusted the post because "it was on Facebook." The result was a melted sheet of dough with a cloyingly sweet flavor. "A disaster," she said. Meanwhile, Marquez-Sharpnack has seen her own photos reused without permission on Facebook, Pinterest, and even Etsy, where one seller included her recipes in a digital cookbook. With most of her traffic still coming from Google, she now urges readers to verify what they click: check URLs, look for real "about" pages, and be wary of impossible or overly glossy images. Etsy Inc. and Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. didn't respond to requests for comment. Pinterest Inc. said creators' traffic can fluctuate for many reasons and emphasized that its generative-AI tools are meant to supplement, not replace, human creativity. In a statement, Google said that "AI Overviews are often a helpful starting point to learn about a dish, but we see that people still want to go and read original recipes from creators. We're focused on making it easy for people to discover and visit useful sites that have a good user experience." For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic -- and her revenue -- has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI's ChatGPT was released, it wasn't until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she's gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. "I'm going to have to find something else to do." This holiday season is on track to be Forrest's slowest in years. She fears that if more content creators give up, the AI won't have new content to draw from, except content generated by AI. It may get to a point where "AI is just talking to itself," and home cooks are gambling with the results, she said. Internet users may be drawn to easy, quick AI answers as an alternative to web pages in part because food bloggers often include personal essays -- sometimes running to many paragraphs -- on their pages, meaning readers must scroll before reaching a recipe at the bottom. That's a phenomenon that also came about because of Google: longer content historically allowed higher ranking in search results and more space for ads. The food bloggers said Google still delivers the bulk of their traffic, but the once-steady source now comes with unpredictable fluctuations they struggle to understand or plan around. They're also affecting how food knowledge moves around the internet at a basic level. When searching on Google for Chinese cooking traditions, a casual cook may be satisfied by the AI Overview. But that may draw from The Woks of Life blog, a comprehensive English-language resource for Chinese cooking, according to Sarah Leung, one of its co-creators. Her family has spent years building out reference material on techniques, traditions and culture, she said. "AI summaries have almost completely overtaken results about various Chinese ingredients, many of which had no information online in English before individual creators like us wrote about them." The shift has her questioning whether it's worth publishing new reference guides at all. "In all likelihood, no one will ever discover those pages," she said. Even their cooking videos -- the main way the family teaches Chinese techniques -- are often scraped and summarized by Google's AI Overviews. In one instance, Google prominently credited their work, but Leung said the larger issue remains: "How many people will actually click through to watch?" For Leung, the rise of AI feels less like a new discovery tool and more like a force flattening the very sources it depends on, leaving the creators who built that knowledge increasingly invisible. Often, the material in AI answers comes from more than one source at the same time, leading to issues with accuracy and attribution. Adam Gallagher, who has run Inspired Taste since 2009, calls them "Frankenstein AI recipes." Google's AI takes Inspired Taste's ingredients and combines them with instructions from other popular food blogs, then presents the mash-up as the answer above his own link -- even when people search for his brand by name. His internal data showed that when AI Overviews began showing for queries on cocktails from Inspired Taste, click-through rates to his site were down 30%. In November, Google debuted an updated version of its artificial intelligence model that executives said represented a "massive jump" in reasoning and coding ability. The new model, Gemini 3, was immediately available across all of Google's major products, including search, and could answer questions with interactive graphics. But for Gallagher, the announcement set off alarm bells. After trying out the new Gemini 3-powered Google Search, he found that the interactive graphics output was actually "mashing together our photos along with other publishers' in their plagiarized AI recipes." "With this development, we are now going to have to start to let our followers and readers know what is going on so that they don't follow these Google recipes," Gallagher said. Across the Atlantic, Marita Sinden, founder of MyDinner, has spent more than a decade sharing authentic German recipes with an international audience. Like other bloggers, she's seen sharp declines in visibility: Google traffic down 30% this year, Pinterest down 50%. But in her view, one of the most dramatic shifts is happening on Facebook, where algorithmic ranking routinely pushes exciting AI-generated food images above posts from real cooks. Many of her followers are older, of the generation especially vulnerable to the images of impossible-looking dishes that spread on the platform. She's even seen tutorial videos that advise specifically on how to target elderly Facebook users with AI images. But even if Facebook users take the extra step to verify that the source of the information is real, they may find themselves on an AI-generated website. Some creators say AI systems are now being used to clone their library of work -- lifting their photos, rewriting their recipes, and republishing the results as new "original" work. At least four bloggers told Bloomberg they've discovered AI-generated replicas of their recipes circulating under different domains, with the instructions lightly rephrased and the photos subtly altered by AI. Because the content isn't an exact copy, traditional takedown tools like DMCA aren't straightforward, leaving creators with almost no remedy even when the imitation is obvious. That's what happened to Bjork Ostrom, co-founder of the long-running food site Pinch of Yum. He recently discovered what appeared to be an AI-generated mirror of his entire website -- a German-language version populated with AI-altered copies of his food photos and synthetic, subtly distorted images of his wife and young children. "It was unsettling," he said, describing the shock of scrolling through uncanny photos of his family on a site he had no connection to. The site makes it seem like the content is coming from a human, even though the recipes can no longer be trusted. Sometimes, copied recipes can outperform the originals. Coley Gaffney, a professionally trained chef who runs the blog Coley Cooks, said Pinterest has become "notoriously filled with AI slop," with searches for her most popular dishes now dominated by machine-generated copies. One AI-run site is now capturing the top pin for a search that previously reliably sent readers to her -- using a recipe that she wrote. For The Food Blog, run by Colleen Milne, there's been an even more dramatic erosion of referral traffic. Pinterest had long been Milne's second-largest traffic source after Google, accounting for about a quarter of her overall readers. But she said that figure has been cut by more than half over the past year, falling from roughly 25% to just 11%. Her Pinterest monthly views, once around 1.3 million, dropped to 419,000 and continue to decline. "I have seen several of my recipes and photos copied by AI on Pinterest," she said. "Pinterest has a 'report pin' button, but there's no option for reporting AI copying." Pinterest's own recommendation emails used to surface seasonal dishes from human creators, but now increasingly suggest AI-generated meals, according to Stacie Vaughan, who runs Simply Stacie, where she focuses on family-friendly meals. "It's frustrating to see how much space this kind of content is taking up, especially during what used to be one of the busiest times of the year for food bloggers," she said. Pinterest said its AI-driven recommendations help connect creators with audiences and make high-quality content more discoverable, including food content. The company added that it offers user controls and labels for generative AI content, uses new detection models to flag AI-generated images even without metadata, and enforces both its community guidelines and its generative AI acceptable use guidelines for all AI-created material on the platform. After months of watching platforms shift under their feet, many bloggers say they're entering the holiday season with a mix of anxiety and resignation. As Pinch of Yum's Ostrom put it, "this inevitably is the most, I think, existential point for us as business owners who create content on the internet" -- a change not just in where content appears, but "how the content is being created."

Thanksgiving Dinner Headed for Tragedy as Disastrous AI Recipes Devour Internet

Food bloggers and recipe developers are warning home cooks to be wary of AI-generated recipes that could turn this year's Thanksgiving dinner into a tragedy. As Bloomberg reports, they've watched in horror as AI slop has made searching for a reliable recipe on sites like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest a potential minefield. The publication spoke with 22 independent food creators, who said that "recipe slop" is damaging their businesses -- while misleading consumers into cooking up monstrous and often inedible dishes. It's a sad state of affairs, once again highlighting how AI slop is choking out reliable information on the internet -- while simultaneously undermining the livelihoods of those whose content is being overwhelmed by competing AI slop. Following recipes via Google's notoriously error-prone, AI-generated summaries is definitely a bad idea. According to Bloomberg, the summaries are telling home cooks to bake Christmas cakes for three to four hours, potentially turning them into a chunk of charcoal. Cookie recipes end up like cloying lumps of sugar. Even entire AI-generated recipe sites being listed on Google are sending home cooks down the wrong path. Google told Bloomberg in a statement that its AI Overviews feature is only a "helpful starting point to learn about a dish." "We're focused on making it easy for people to discover and visit useful sites that have a good user experience," the company said, implying that users are being turned off by overly cluttered and hard-to-navigate food blogs. None of this should be particularly surprising. After all, large language models lack any form of human intuition and are simply rehashing and paraphrasing existing content they were trained on, no matter how hard AI companies try to distract us from that reality. The tech also lacks the ability to actually test a recipe in the real world, making it a notably terrible source for cooking advice. Worse yet, those making a living from developing recipes are watching as referral traffic from sites like Google plummets, forcing them to scale down their operations and even lay off employees, according to Bloomberg. Clean Eating Kitchen owner Carrie Forest told the publication that soon we could get to the point at which an "AI is just talking to itself" as traffic to her website continues to dwindle. Others are noticing that their content is being scraped wholesale by Google's AI Overviews, forcing them to reconsider publishing any new guides. Some bloggers have come across websites ripping off their recipes wholesale and evading discovery by mangling them with the help of generative AI. The trend paints a troubling picture of a slop-dominated future, and how it all turns out is anyone's guess -- but in the short term, at least make sure a recipe is human-tested before you try and serve it to all your relatives at Thanksgiving.