As a passionate baker and content creator, I’ve always brought you REAL recipes, tested in a REAL [sometimes messy] kitchen.

Lately, there’s been an high increase in AI-generated content floating around the web—especially in the food and recipe world— mostly on social media and Pinterest.

While AI can be helpful in so many ways, it’s important to be cautious because AI-generated recipes and photos are not reliable.

There are responsible ways creators use AI. I don’t have an issue with that.

But I do have an issue with unchecked AI content being presented as real in an effort to manipulate.

As fellow food blogger Lynn April of ​Fresh April Flours​ said it in her ​recent IG reel​, “These recipe websites and accounts are flooding the internet and social platforms with clickbait. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a photo that draws you in because it looks absolutely incredible and on the other side, it’s a garbage “recipe” that was put together by a computer who thinks it might work.”

Here’s why this matters

AI-generated photos are getting better and more realistic. These fake photos can look appealing and downright delicious but lack the care, testing, and precision that goes into real recipes… especially baking.

These AI recipes and photos are usually put together by machines that guess what might work, often leading to disappointing messes, failed results, or downright dangerous advice regarding food.

Here are the most extreme examples I found while perusing the web…

• Google AI spit out advice telling someone to ​glue cheese to their pizza and eat at least one small rock per day​.
• A supermarket AI bot gave out recipes for ​poison sandwiches and a deadly chlorine gas​.
• ​Fictional authors are writing 4-5 cookbooks a month, like the fictional Teresa J Blair and Lillian D Stewart​ – fake cookbooks that are ripping off legitimate cookbooks and many customers.

I don’t want you to waste your expensive ingredients on recipes that are setting you up for failure before you begin.

📢 PSA: How to Spot AI-Generated Recipes and Photos

Unnatural Looking Photos

Sometimes the AI messes up and you’ll notice hand and fingers that look “off”—too long, too many joints, not enough fingers, weird wrinkles, or positioned awkwardly. Honestly, AI just isn’t great at human anatomy.

Real food has texture! If something looks too flawless—like frosting with no texture or super shiny surfaces—it might not be real. To me, it ends up looking plastic or like it belongs in a DreamWorks Animation.

Any object with slight curves, awkward proportions, strange shapes, or unclear endings are an immediate sign that a photo has been generated by AI.

Lack of Real Personal Engagement on Social Media

There’s no real person behind the account. Does the content creator show their face and interact with their audience? Do they post stories or share their kitchen setup or their family life?

Repetitive comments flood the post. If all the reviews or comments are short and similar (e.g., “Tasty!” “Yummy!”), or all posted within a short timeframe, it’s likely not a genuine community of real bakers – it’s often bots generating fake engagement to trick the algorithm into boosting the post out to real humans for engagement.

The author gives you no real feedback. Quality content creators offer FAQs, tips, and troubleshooting advice in their posts. They also respond to their comment section. If you don’t see any of this, the recipe might not be from a tested source.

I take pride in the fact that every recipe on my blog is made with care, tested thoroughly, and designed to help you succeed in the kitchen. My goal is to provide you with not only delicious recipes, but also guidance, tips, and the science behind why they work.

❗️Red Flags in Recipes

Here’s what to look for:

Uncommon ingredients or steps: Recipes that call for odd combinations that you’ve never seen (like mixing margarine with almond milk and coconut to make a frosting), it’s a red flag.

Confusing steps: If the steps feel jumbled or don’t flow well together, it’s a sign the recipe might not have been tested by a real person.

Vague or missing measurements: Be wary of recipes that don’t give you clear, accurate amounts of ingredients or cooking times. Often these recipes are lacking crucial ingredients like flour or sugar.

When you find an “AI Recipe” that turns out well, it’s because AI stole it from a genuine creator.

The truth.

Many recipe developers—people like me—are losing their livelihoods because of this.

AI models have been trained on content freely taken from our blogs, which we’ve spent years developing and testing.

The result? Websites are flooded with untested, poorly constructed recipes masquerading as legitimate, while the real ones are being buried.

Slowly, recipe blogs—the ones where real people test recipes in their own kitchens and provide them to you for free—will begin to disappear.

And here’s why: running a website isn’t cheap.

It costs thousands of dollars per year to keep my blog running safely and securely.

Unfortunately, scammers are also scraping websites like mine for quality recipes and then running our images through AI to make them look “fresh” and “new” to skirt copyright laws. This leaves creators with no legal recourse on our intellectual property theft.

I’ve even found my recipes for sale on Etsy by scammers in Asia.

And people were buying them.

It’s a battle to keep our hard work from being stolen and re-purposed into fake content that generates clicks.

Many scammers are turning this AI content into paid ebooks and pay-per-recipe. It’s fraud to say the least.

Scammers care more about their bottom line than actually helping you in the kitchen.

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Thank you for being here and for supporting real, quality recipes!

Your trust means everything to me and every recipe you try helps us continue to exist and create content that you can count on.

My results are as real as the love I put into my baking! 🍰❤️

If you ever notice an error or typo in my recipes, please bring it to my attention so I can correct it and maintain the high integrity I strive for on my site.

-Stephanie Gonzalez, CEO + Creator
Pretty Simple Sweet

Culinary AI is getting more advanced

Generative AI models and large language models (LLMs) like the ones used for recipe creation, produce responses using pre-existing data sets, in this case recipes that already exist and have been created most often by a human. They do not currently have the cognitive function to create original recipes with meaning or emotion.

But there have been some promising developments when it comes to AIs creating convincingly human-like recipes. Ganesh Bagler, a computational researcher at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi, has been attempting to “capture the culinary creativity of humans” in his novel recipe generation algorithm “​Ratatouille​“. It was trained using more than 118,000 traditional recipes from across 74 countries.

This excerpt is from the BBC article: ​‘It looks like cat food’: The grey goop dreamed up by artificial intelligence published August 26, 2024.