AI Is a Lousy Chef

The LibGen list included pirated work from Elisabeth and from me and from thousands of other authors, but I was stunned to when I typed in “America’s Test Kitchen” and 163 results came up, scores of their books like Paleo Perfected, Air Fryer Perfection, Foolproof Fish, and The Complete Baby and Toddler Cookbook.

“It feels like AI is in its Napster phase,” a recipe editor and culinary librarian friend of mine once quipped, “except the pirates are some of the world’s biggest companies.”

ATK is a prodigious publisher and everything on the Atlantic list appears to have been scraped by LibGen. It was then likely hoovered up by Meta and Open AI, perhaps shedding light on how the sage sausage gets made. It’s possible that part of the database the two companies used did not help train their products to write recipes. It’s possible it did.

Working backward, I prompted DishGen for a chorizo and black bean chimichanga like the one in ATK’s The Best Mexican Recipes, and DishGen created something quite different. Then I looked for a slow cooker spaghetti squash with tomato sauce like the one in ATK’s Multicooker Perfection, and DishGen brought up something surprisingly similar that included just about everything on the ATK ingredient list except tomato paste.

Right after this, I looked at the list of recipes I had cooked in DishGen and the illustrated thumbnails looked surprisingly like the work of Sarah Becan, whose wonderful Let’s Make Dumplings and Let’s Make Ramen, both with chef Hugh Amano, are part of the LibGen database.

DishGen did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite all this, so many of the AI-generated recipes I found were neither interesting nor well written, meaning cooking from them becomes more difficult and less rewarding.

“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,” says 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.”

One of DishGen’s services is meal planning, which would be intriguing if the recipes it pulls from the LLMs were more notable. It’s an interesting service and the repackaging it does is impressive, but it is pulling from often-underwhelming source material. Home cooks would be better served if it could point people at better recipes or if the LLMs licensed great recipes from trusted sources.

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/year), or New York Times Cooking ($50/year). If you have a bunch of cookbooks, try Eat Your Books/CookShelf ($40/year). If you want meal plans with recipes created by a chef, try Ends and Stems ($114/year).

Right before I wrapped up, I typed “brats and sage” into NYT Cooking and it came back with Country-Sausage and Sage Dressing. And even without cooking it, I just decided that won, because I trust them.