It was shocking to see that the LibGen list contained pirated works by Elisabeth, me and thousands of other writers. “America’s Test Kitchen” The search returned 163 hits, a number of books similar to theirs. Paleo Perfected, Air Fryer Perfect, Fishing for Foolproof FishThen, This is the complete baby and toddler cookbook.
“It feels like AI is in its Napster phase,” One of my friends who was a recipe and culinary editor once made the following comment: “except the pirates are some of the world’s biggest companies.”
ATK has a huge publishing empire and it seems that LibGen scraped everything off the Atlantic List. Meta and Open AI likely swept it up. This could shed light on what goes into making the sausage. There’s a chance that a portion of the database used by the two companies did not assist in teaching their software to create recipes. The database could have helped.
As I worked backwards, I asked DishGen to make a black bean and chorizo chimichanga similar to the ATK recipe. Best Mexican RecipesDishGen came up with something completely different. After that, I searched for slow cooker spaghetti with tomato sauce similar to the recipe in ATK Multicooker PerfectionDishGen also came up with a dish that was similar to ATK’s list of ingredients, except for tomato paste.
After this I went back to the DishGen list and saw that the thumbnails of the recipes looked like Sarah Becan’s wonderful work. Let’s Make Dumplings You can also find out more about the following: Let’s Make RamenLibGen’s database includes two videos featuring chef Hugh Amano.
DishGen didn’t respond to my request for a comment.
All this notwithstanding, many of the AI generated recipes that I came across were neither well-written nor interesting, making cooking with them less fun and more complicated.
“When I’ve tried AI recipes it feels like the engine has scraped details from many sources and then spit out a sort of weird recipe average,” Dan Souza, Chief Content Officer at America’s Test Kitchen. “You might get something that is baseline tasty, but it’s never memorable. Which makes sense. No one is tasting it before you try it.”
DishGen offers meal planning services, but it would be more interesting if they used recipes from LLMs. Although it’s a great service, the source material it uses is not always impressive. The LLMs could do a better job of pointing out better recipes to home cooks or licensing great recipes.
Here are a couple ideas: Instead of turning your meals over to those LLMs with ethically dubious sourcing and no taste buds, use the money you would’ve spent on an AI recipe subscription to buy a few cookbooks—here are dozens of suggestions for all skill levels—or get a subscription to ATK (80 dollars per year) New York Times Cooking ($50/year). You can use them to organize your cookbooks. Eat Your Books/CookShelf ($40/year). Try meal planning with chef-created recipes. Ends and Stems ($114/year).
Before I finished, I typed “brats and sage” It was a great experience to read NYT Cooking. Country-Sausage and Sage Dressing. Even without having cooked it, I decided to go with the winner, simply because I trusted them.
