{"id":3588,"date":"2025-12-28T08:30:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T13:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/?p=3588"},"modified":"2025-12-28T08:34:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T13:34:06","slug":"baker-beware-how-i-was-fooled-by-and-ai-generated-recipe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/?p=3588","title":{"rendered":"Baker Beware: How I Was Fooled by and AI-Generated Recipe"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Baker Beware: How I Was Fooled by and AI-Generated Recipe<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\tIt started with the cutest little desserts: chocolate acorns with nut-covered caps that popped up in my search for Thanksgiving cookies on Pinterest, a site I visit for inspiration and some step-by-step instructions. There were also chocolate-dipped strawberries that you could turn into little turkeys using pretzel sticks, with marshmallow pieces for the drumsticks, but the acorns looked easier.<\/b><\/i> \n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\u201cWho wouldn\u2019t love these things?\u201d I thought.

\n\nThe recipe said you could whip up a batch in 45 minutes. I splurged and bought my favorite Lindt chocolate bars to make them.

\n\nIt ended at 1 a.m., after about five hours of effort \u2013 including an emergency run to the grocery store for a missing ingredient \u2013 with parchment-covered baking sheets spread across my kitchen, holding misshapen globs of chocolate-dunked peanut butter sandwich cookies that didn\u2019t come close to resembling acorns. Despite my many attempts at adjusting the temperature of the chocolate and MacGyvering the cookies \u2014 I cut them, stacked them and stuck them together with chocolate \u2014 they just could not match the acorns in the photo.

\n\nI\u2019m usually pretty good at these things (pie crust being a frustrating exception). I\u2019m an experienced baker, and this should have been an easy project, more assembly than baking. I wasn\u2019t going for gourmet; I needed a lot of treats for a church event and was short on time.

\n\nI finally had to admit that no matter how many times I reread the recipe and attempted to follow the instructions, it wasn\u2019t going to work. I was stumped.

\n\nThen it dawned on me: Could this recipe have been generated by AI? Had I been had?

\n\nEven as I had been reading through the instructions, I kept wondering how the blogger got the Nutter Butter cookies \u2014 which are flat, with a peanut-like curved shape \u2014 to turn into the nice rounded shape of the acorns. The recipe recommends holding the cookies by the pointier end \u201cto create the more natural looking\u201d acorn.

\n\nOK, I thought. Maybe I need to just trust the process.

\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re ridiculously cute, surprisingly simple, and honestly? They\u2019ve become the most photographed dessert at every family gathering I bring them to,\u201d gushed food blogger Anna Kelly, who described herself as a professionally trained pastry chef who runs the website DessertsPro.com. \u201cMy sister-in-law now requests them specifically, and I\u2019ve made them at least twelve times since I first stumbled upon the idea three years ago.\u201d

\n\nI fell for it. I bought three packages of the regular-size Nutter Butter cookies and searched several stores for the bite-size ones, which were supposed to be for the caps. Then I noticed a problem: The bite-size cookies were much smaller than the ends of the big Nutter Butters. It didn\u2019t seem like they would work to make the overhanging acorn cap.

\n\nI still didn\u2019t question the recipe. Instead, I thought I had bought the wrong size cookies. Was there a medium-size Nutter Butter? Oh, the recipe said Kelly sometimes uses Nilla wafers. That made more sense, but it was getting late, and I wasn\u2019t going back to the grocery store.

\n\nThankfully, the chocolate melted like it was supposed to, but it was pretty thin, and I was losing hope that it would coat the cookies thickly enough to look like the acorns in the photo. I tried popping it in the freezer to thicken it.

\n\nThe website DessertsPro.com says Kelly created it to share her favorite tried-and-true recipes with home cooks. Her \u201cAbout Us\u201d page promises \u201cclear, simple instructions,\u201d easy-to-find ingredients, \u201chonest tips and tricks\u201d and \u201crecipes that actually work.\u201d

\n\nThe problem is that neither Kelly nor her creations appears to be real.

\n \u2018Bad actors\u2019 <\/b>

\n\nI attempted to reach the creators of the site through a \u201ccontact us\u201d email as well as through the contact form but got no response by my deadline. I also attempted to contact Kelly through another food blog set up with her name and profile, MuffinIdeas.com. This site uses the same photo and syrupy text that talks about Kelly\u2019s nostalgia for her grandmother\u2019s baking, but the bio is slightly different: It says she\u2019s not professionally trained but self-taught by reading countless baking books by the likes of celebrated chefs like Dorie Greenspan, the very real author of \u201cBaking with Dorie,\u201d and David Lebovitz, author of \u201cReady for Dessert.\u201d

\n\nEmails sent to both websites were returned as undeliverable.

\n\n\u201cThis site is almost certainly AI,\u201d said Adam Gallagher, who runs the food blog Inspired Taste, which he started with his wife, Joanne, in 2009.

\n\nThe Gallaghers have been outspoken about the growing volume of AI-generated images and recipes meant to look like genuine food blogs that have permeated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest.

\n\nThey say that not only are these fake sites siphoning traffic that used to go to real bloggers, AI technology is scraping sites like theirs and emulating their style to create the computer-generated content it churns out.

\n\nIt\u2019s not that artificial intelligence, as a tool, is necessarily a bad thing, says Tom Critchlow, executive vice president for audience growth at Raptive, a company that helps bloggers and other creators monetize their content. It would be one thing, maybe, for a real chef or food blogger to use some AI to help refine their writing or get new ideas.

\n\nBut that\u2019s not what\u2019s happening here, Critchlow says.

\n\n\u201cThese are bad actors generating hundreds of thousands of brand new, fresh domains that have never been seen before, using AI to generate hundreds and thousands of AI-generated recipes, images, et cetera, and covering the websites with ads,\u201d he said.

\n\n\u201cPinterest has been overrun by these spammers,\u201d Critchlow said. \u201cAlmost any kind of search term or any kind of exploration on Pinterest in the food and recipe space leads you to these websites, which are just spam top to bottom.\u201d

\n\nEven sites with worthless content can make money when people click and scroll through them, just as I did when trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

\n\nOn average, content creators earn about $30 to $50 for every 1,000 page views to their sites, according to Raptive.

\n\nOne food blogger might spend hours creating, testing and shooting a recipe to earn that rate, but AI-generated sites can earn the same money for content created in minutes.

\n\n\u201cWhen you look at the scale and volume of these things, there are whole networks of sites, hundreds of sites, made by a single individual,\u201d Critchlow said, noting that videos on YouTube also show how to do this.

\n\nRaptive says it kicks creators and websites out of its network if it discovers that they\u2019re using AI tools to make spam recipes. This year alone, the company says, it\u2019s blocked nearly 600 sites \u2013 of about 6,000 in its network \u2013 for AI-related issues.

\n The AI clues I missed <\/b>

\n\nWhen I read back through my apparently fake recipe, I find clues I initially missed.

\n\nIn the introduction, \u201cAnna Kelly\u201d writes that her nephew calls her Aunt Sarah, rather than Anna. The text says the site was created in 2019, but it \u2013 like MuffinIdeas.com \u2013 was copyrighted in 2025. Had I clicked around on some of the other recipes, I might have noticed that some of the photos were suspect: The blueberries in a loaf of sourdough bread are impossibly round purple craters, and the cupcakes or muffins (cuffins?) in Kelly\u2019s profile pic have frosting that magically fades into the cake.

\n\nThe recipe I attempted didn\u2019t have any ratings or comments \u2013 another red flag, since I normally rely on the cooks who\u2019ve gone before me for tips.

\n\n\u201cPeople have a shiny look. It\u2019s almost like everyone\u2019s a little plasticky. That\u2019s a telltale sign,\u201d Gallagher said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, everything\u2019s in a little bit of Saran Wrap.\u201d

\n\nI found the recipe on Pinterest, but the site links to accounts on Instagram, Facebook and X, though these profiles have little to no followers.

\n\n\u201cConsumers are being duped by all the platforms,\u201d Gallagher said.

\n\nHe says platforms like Pinterest aren\u2019t really motivated to filter out AI spam because they make money no matter where the recipe comes from, as long as it keeps people scrolling.

\n\nMeta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment by deadline.\n\nPinterest did not offer a direct comment but said it disagrees with the idea that it isn\u2019t motivated to help users who want to avoid AI-generated content. It says it will certainly hurt its business if people get frustrated by the content that\u2019s on the site and stop coming.

\n\nIt also says user feedback led the company to create an AI filter that users can turn on in their settings, which can help keep computer-generated content out of their feeds. It added the filter to the Food and Drinks category in mid-December. AI images are also supposed to be labeled when you enlarge them. The chocolate acorn photo I clicked on doesn\u2019t have such a label, though.

\n\nGallagher and Critchlow said they\u2019ve tried the filter and didn\u2019t notice a difference in their feeds. The company says the tool is new and should get better over time.

\n\nPinterest also pointed me to an audit, performed by the digital security reporting site The Indicator, testing the promises of platforms to label AI-generated content, which was posted by the reporters. The audit found that five major platforms repeatedly failed to label AI-generated content on their sites, including content created using their own AI tools.

\n\nPinterest was the most successful at labeling AI images, the audit found, but still had a success rate of 55%.

\n\n\u201cI want to give Pinterest a little bit of credit, because they were early in introducing a way for users to filter AI content out of their feeds, which I think is something that all platforms should be doing,\u201d said Alexios Mantzarlis, a former Google executive who is co-founder of the Indicator and did the AI testing for the story.

\n\n\u201cSo Pinterest, I think, is understanding from its users that the stuff sometimes is very annoying, and it appears to be reacting,\u201d Mantzarlis said, though its tools aren\u2019t great at flagging AI just yet.\n\nThe company says it doesn\u2019t want to ban AI completely because some people find that it inspires them.

\n\nThe Gallaghers think there are more pragmatic reasons some social media sites haven\u2019t been aggressive in tackling AI content.

\n\nThe more content a platform has and the longer a user continues to scroll, the more ads it can show, Joanne Gallagher said.

\n Baking a fake<\/b>

\n\nSpam sites aren\u2019t the only way AI makes up recipes. Adam Gallagher points out that if you Google a particular thing you want to cook, the AI-generated summary that appears at the top of the page may be a complete recipe that was created with parts of recipes taken from the Inspired Taste blog and others that are smushed together and ultimately might not make anything worth eating.

\n\n\u201cWe call them Frankenstein recipes,\u201d he said. Although the summaries link back to their sources, Gallagher said, few people click through to it, relying instead on the summary results.

\n\nGoogle says it cares deeply about the quality of the information on the internet and points to its policies that prohibit producing content at scale for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings. Last year, the company says, it launched a policy against scaled content abuse that targets the creation of many low-value pages for the primary purpose of manipulating search and news rankings.

\n\nAs for the AI summaries in its search, the company says users were looking for these kinds of tools, which are meant to highlight and help surface content rather than prevent traffic to it.\n\n\u201cAI 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\u2019re focused on making it easy for people to discover and visit useful sites that have a good user experience.\u201d

\n\nThe Gallaghers said the AI spam, or slop, doesn\u2019t hurt established sites like theirs as much because they have a loyal audience that comes to them directly for their recipes.

\n\nInstead, they worry about food bloggers who are just getting started, who depend on social media and search tools to generate traffic.

\n\n\u201cUnfortunately, on all of these platforms, you have high-quality, trusted creators intermingled with all of this AI slop,\u201d Adam Gallagher said.

\n\nWhen it\u2019s hard to tell them apart, it erodes trust.

\n\n\u201cWhen they keep chiseling away that trust, then you\u2019re going to trust us less too, because you\u2019re not going to find us,\u201d Joanne Gallagher said. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to be using Pinterest or Facebook or Instagram or whatever to actually find recipes anymore.\u201d

\n\nAs for me, even though I live and work online and Googling has become my default way to find just about everything, I find myself coming out of this episode with a new appreciation for my cookbooks.

\nWho knows, maybe AI will end up boosting book sales, which wouldn\u2019t be such a bad thing.


\n\nContributor: Brenda Goodman – CNN Health<\/i>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Baker Beware: How I Was Fooled by and AI-Generated Recipe It started with the cutest little desserts: chocolate acorns with nut-covered caps that popped up in my search for Thanksgiving cookies on Pinterest, a site I visit for inspiration and some step-by-step instructions. There were also chocolate-dipped strawberries that you could turn into little turkeys […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-news-and-information","category-nutrition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3592,"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3588\/revisions\/3592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claremontcoloniccenter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}