Thanksgiving ruined? Maybe AI is to blame

November 25, 2025 by
 |  9 Comments  |  Leave Comment

Lots of people use generative AI tools like ChatGPT to find answers to their questions, including their food questions. Food bloggers are noticing fewer visitors to their sites as more people turn to AI for recipes, sometimes with disastrous results. As reported in Bloomberg, many of the AI recipes are replete with errors or contain AI images that are impossible to reduce.

Eb Gargano is one food blogger who has noticed a dramatic downtick in the number of people who find her recipes for stress-free turkey and Christmas cake. She says that AI often takes bits from several different food blogs or recipes sites and stitches them together, often creating a mismatch that would result in disaster. For instance, the AI version of her Christmas cake instructs readers to bake a 6-inch cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F (160°C). Gargano says if you followed those directions “You’d end up with charcoal!”

Recipe blogger Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack warned her Facebook followers about bad AI recipes. She showed two AI photos that had big mistakes – laying tamales flat in a steamer and having sauce poured over the still-wrapped tamales. “Little details like this are big red flags,” she told her followers. “When you search for recipes, make sure they come from trusted human cooks who actually test their food.”

The Woks of Life creator Sarah Leung wonders if putting in so much effort to meticulously research and write about the techniques, traditions, and culture of the Chinese recipes on the blog she co-created. Because of the push toward AI summaries, she says that “In all likelihood, no one will ever discover those pages.”

Bjork Ostrom, co-founder of the food site Pinch of Yum, discovered an entire AI site in another language that lifted his recipes and reproduced AI-modified images of his food photos – and photos of his family. “It was unsettling,” he told Bloomberg.

Reading these stories makes me wonder about AI cookbooks. I think about the stacks of discount books at large stores like Barnes & Noble. They were already hit-or-miss with quality before AI (usually ‘miss’). With AI? Fuggedaboudit. This makes me value my cookbook collection even more.

Category: Antipasto

Post a comment

9 Comments

  • MarciK  on  November 26, 2025

    I’ve been loving an AI tool by Meta this year while prepping for Thanksgiving where it has actual conversations. But you have to be really careful I wanted to put turkey wings on stuffing while baking but wasn’t sure of the cooking time. I went to this app to discuss the cooking time of the wings which take longer and the stuffing. It told me to put the wings on after 20 minutes so they get done in time. You really have to pay attention what it’s telling you and question it. But it has saved me a lot of time from searching technical details, small curiosities and random thoughts.

  • Wende  on  November 26, 2025

    I had some overripe bananas so I asked Chatgpt for a recipe for banana muffins with dates and walnuts. The recipe didn’t seem to have any red flags, so I used it and ended up with the worst muffins I ever made.

  • chefmichael  on  November 26, 2025

    I hate that AI is hurting food blogging, but I love that AI saves me from search engines and ads. From a cooking perspective, I do really like using AI to search for comments across sites on recipes by name and author. I do make sure that the comments are for the exact recipe I am researching.

  • That50  on  November 27, 2025

    As a historian, I’ve seen AI summaries reach completely wrong conclusions about historical topics—if you read the actual articles instead of the AI summaries, you find that the bot totally flipped the script. So I do not trust AI at all. I adore Eat Your Books because it allows me to find recipes that I know have been tested.

  • gamulholland  on  November 27, 2025

    I’ve turned off the AI summaries feature. Avoiding AI as much as possible— I’m in medicine, and I’m finding that the AI-generated notes are often just sort of babble.

  • Zephyrness  on  November 28, 2025

    I don’t trust AI for much of anything, having had it give me info I knew was wrong/outdated/mashed together for several specific questions. I would never trust it with recipes, since there are a lot of internet published recipes that have not been idiot proofed. A chicken cassorole found by my college age kids involved 2 chicken breasts that you baked with other ingredients for 15 minutes or “until cheese melts”. No mention that the chicken needed to be precooked. I ended up springing for pizza. But those recipes are part of what AI is looking at for its answers So no, no Chatgpt for me.
    I have also moved to a yearly subscription-based search engine with no advertising and no AI, unless I specifically use it for a search, so yay for that. Besides, its much more fun to search Eatyourbooks. I have a recipe for most things, I just don’t remember where.

  • whitewoods  on  November 28, 2025

    I see from the comments here that some folks have gotten some useful information from the AI. I have only ever used it for pretty simple questions like regarding temperature or how to cook simple things, like meat or vegetables. I wouldn’t really trust it to put together an actual (multi-ingredient) recipe though–that’s why I have EYB … so that I can find potential (presumably tested) recipes based on ingredient searches.

  • Rinshin  on  November 29, 2025

    I use both chatgpt and grok to come up with a recipe for something I’ve had at restaurants, japanese convenience stores like family mart. Lawson, etc, from my memory, and such. I have had very good luck with them. For example, it produced perfect Family Mart gochugaru oden. It was perfect. It have to go back and forth talking with it to get it to the point I think is right or will work.

  • Rinshin  on  November 29, 2025

    I’ve tried 10 or so recipes and I rated them all 5 stars except 1 which I rated 4. Just recently I asked to produce something from my memory of brussels sprouts my German friend who was at least decade older married to a military man when I was only 20. She used to have me at her home often and I used to watch her cook and ate dinner with them. Recipe according yo chatgpt is called Kohl-Sprossen geschmort mit Muskat. Just like what she made. It came up with it after explaining when I tasted, how it tasted, appearance etc. Wonderful memories.

Seen anything interesting? Let us know & we'll share it!

Categories

Archives