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In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering blog format, where there's an un

In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering blog format, where there's an unnecessary story about the author's trip somewhere or their child's school play being the inspiration for making this particular recipe, followed by the actual recipe details. The machine generated stories are even more pointless and meandering than what humans come up with and the recipe details have steps that contradict each other and specify ingredients that shouldn't be in the dish and weren't on the ingredients list. I don't know how many people are fooled by these recipes and end up with a cooking disaster but if we start seeing faulty machine generated instructions on how to do electrical work or engine repair, the consequences will be much greater when followed. The real annoyance is that because these machine generated articles learned from sites that maximize SEO, the generated articles are rapidly rising to the top of search results and crowding out actual good information that wasn't SEO maximized.

cossatot 4y ago
It may be that the 21st century Turing test will be 'whether an AI can tell that content is AI generated". Otherwise it may be much harder to filter the AI-generated content.
jorgemf 4y ago
I think the problem you are describing is not only about AI, it is about trusting your sources of information. I can happen with content from humans.
- acdha 4y ago
  Yes - AI moves this to another level of scale but Google’s need to sell ad placements created the environment for that to work. When they can’t even be troubled to de-rank blatant StackExchange/GitHub/Wikipedia scrapers it created a big opportunity for these low-quality content farms limited only by their ability to generate content on every topic.
- notart666 4y ago
  Except for the fact that it does so on an unprecide dented scale allowing small groups of people to do things without necessarily being caught allowing for far more effective ways of control. Even without it, it's hard to argue for the existence of online forums when hackernews is a classic example of why it doesn't work when the majority of the 'intellectuals' have an inflated belief and understanding on topics they have no basic understand on. It's so bad that none of the actual subject matter experts talk here besides ones with financial interests in the products themselves and the experts fearful of retribution. The irony is almost comedic.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  I have cookbooks, both physical and in digital formats, but it's usually faster to do a web search, especially when I mostly need cooking time and temperature. Perhaps this will motivate me to finally get around the setting up a local search function for my electronic cookbook collection as the web is going to be less and less trustworthy.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Firefox makes it pretty easy to add a custom search engine. That one could point to your local server instance. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch#autodiscovery_of_search_plugins https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch#auto...
  - ginko 4y ago
    For all its flaws I find Youtube is one of the best sources for recipes these days. Especially when you search in the language of the country the dishes are from and use CC auto-translate.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      It's ironic that for all our cheering of democratization of creation, we turn back to gatekeeping (video harder to produce than text) in a search for quality. Although maybe that's more a comment on the inevitable end state of democratization of creation + centralization of search/discovery + monetization of traffic.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Why is it ironic? I think it's more of a "humans are unable to learn from history moment". Romans called it "the mob" because of the common problems that occurred when large groups of undirected people got together and chaos broke loose. Of course the opposite where the authoritarian leader ruled everything also lead to Rome burning. There is a happier middleground where multiple gates exist to filter out the bullshit, but no said gatekeeper controls the entire market leading to monopoly behavior.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  I have never encountered GPs problem where the recipe itself (the thing I was searching for) rather than the surrounding SEO fluff was AI generated trash. If this problem widely proliferates, especially into other domains, curation is going to become absolutely vital.
  - wjholden 4y ago
    There's a lot of junk writing that may or may not be authored by humans about health and fitness. Search Google for "how to do more pull-ups" and you'll find thousands of long, meandering, trash articles of generic common sense with stock images and lots of ads on spammy domains.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  With content from humans, there has to be sufficient motivation to produce a significant quantity of coherent garbage (since it takes time and effort) which means that you can trust by default because intentionally generated garbage is rare unless the topic is one of the niches where there is motivation for it (e.g. politics, history related to politics, and sales). Like, sometimes people do put in exceptional effort to fabricate something as a practical joke, but that is sufficiently rare that you can ignore it in your daily life. Without AI-generated content, cookie recipes would be "safe" from that, since only people who care about cookies would bother to write up articles about them - but now you suddenly have to mistrust all sources of all information, which is a new thing.
  - jorgemf 4y ago
    Create content with AI will be easier and faster, but it doesnt mean humans wont generate garbage. That is one of the main problems of the search engines. And as long as you can put ads in your content you can create any garbage and put ads there to make money, as long as the content sounds relevant for a lot of people. For me the main issue with AI creating content in internet is going to be the echo chamber of that content being used to train new AI models.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law The bullshit asymmetry principle puts forth that algorithmic 'bullshit' content is even worse as quantity is a quality all in itself when you're debunking the bullshit. In general the reader will not know if the producer of the bullshit is a real human or a bot. This makes the search engines job even harder as not only do you have the standard human bullshit you have to get rid of, you have an oceans torrent of AI generated bullshit that you have to waste energy on getting rid of. HN has a common theme of saying that "Dead internet theory is wrong", I personally just think they've not waited long enough and it's becoming more true every day.
    - tomatotomato37 4y ago
      It's the mass production that is the problem. A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care. Content farms won't trim down their 100 outsourced artists or writers to 10 curators; they will cut the stack completely, and just pipe whatever noise the AI generates straight into the commons. Even if 99.999% of it is complete nonsensical garbage, if they produce fast enough the remaining 0.001% of actually good content can still result in massive profits
hoosieree 4y ago
What's not to like? Custard? Good! Jam? Good! Meat? Good!
- dmje 4y ago
  Have an upvote as I lol into my soup :-)
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I would be very interested in your meat jam custard recipe. Asking for a friendly AI.
  - mirekrusin 4y ago
    That's Joey from Friends [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSFgDZJVYbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSFgDZJVYbo
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Here is my own favorite way of doing jam custard: > I am not able to provide a recipe for meat jam custard as I do not have the ability to access information on specific recipes. However, I can provide some general guidelines on how you might go about making a meat jam custard. > First, you will need to select a type of meat to use for the jam. This could be any type of meat that you enjoy and that is suitable for cooking and preserving. Some common options for meat jam include pork, beef, chicken, or lamb. > Once you have selected your meat, you will need to cook it until it is tender and well-done. This can be done by boiling, roasting, or slow-cooking the meat, depending on your preference and the type of meat you are using. > Once the meat is cooked, you will need to shred or finely chop it and mix it with a jamming or preserving agent, such as sugar, honey, or fruit juice. This will help to preserve the meat and give it a jam-like consistency. > Next, you will need to prepare a custard base for the meat jam. This can be done by mixing together eggs, milk, and any desired flavorings, such as vanilla or spices. > Finally, you will need to combine the meat jam and custard mixture and pour it into a baking dish. Bake the dish in the oven until the custard is set and the top is golden brown. > Keep in mind that this is just a general idea of how you might go about making a meat jam custard, and the specific ingredients and cooking methods may vary depending on the recipe you are using. It is always best to follow a recipe carefully and make any necessary adjustments based on your personal preferences and the ingredients you have on hand.
thanatos519 4y ago
The stories aren't just SEO-pandering. They're copyright-pandering: https://www.chatelaine.com/food/food-blog-recipe-storytelling/ https://www.chatelaine.com/food/food-blog-recipe-storytellin...
burkaman 4y ago
Can you link one? Sounds very interesting.
ghaff 4y ago
I guess I'm in the minority of actually appreciating a lot of the background. And it can't just be SEO given that cookbooks these days are hardly just lists of recipes for the most part and people do apparently buy them.
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  Absolutely, buying an actualy printed cook book is more than the recipes. I'm not sure the same thing is true for the 10M "Best Ever Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipes on the web.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I guess if I'm just looking for a recipe the text is easy enough to skip. Often there's even a jump to recipe button. But photos etc. are often appreciated as well as some sense of why this recipe might be different.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  It's not just SEO it's also a requirement to get copyright protection
  - ghaff 4y ago
    So? Someone else can (and often does) just copy the recipe. So if you don't think the rest of the content has any value, what has been gained by writing it? If I had a cooking site--which I don't--I'd certainly want to do more than just post recipes irrespective of monetary considerations.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  Well to me there's two distinct types of background: 1. Background directly related to the recipe/cooking in general. 2. The writer's personal anecdotes tangentially related to the recipe. Some cooking blogs have great background (eg. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's work on Serious Eats) but I would say they're mostly type 1 - information that informs you about the recipe, how they developed it, technique etc. They have type 2 background as well (jokes, what inspired them to make the recipe, snippets of their day-to-day lives) but it's definitely a small proportion of the body of the text. These blogs always have background that's work reading. What I can't stand is the blogs with reams and reams of text of nothing but personal anecdotes, meandering stories, media references, what their kids are up to etc etc, occasionally returning to talk about something to do with the recipe. I don't have any examples because I now avoid untrusted recipe blogs like the plague, but it becomes very obvious to me when a recipe blog strays from useful background to worthless padding for the sake of copyright and SEO.
ren_engineer 4y ago
there's a paper that basically shows these LLMs are pretty much tapped out in terms of quality data to train on, not sure if there are any legit architecture improvements in the works to improve results quality but it seems brute force training with more data may be about over - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04325.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04325.pdf As for SEO, Google is going to have to stop being lazy and relying so much on backlinks and domain authority. They might have to consider allowing searchers to essentially vote on what they consider good. I don't see any other way low quality AI content doesn't dominate SERPs, established players will spin up entire sites and spam backlinks to them all. There are also people working on using AI to identify obvious AI content by finding patterns in the output which is probably our only hope. For social media and forums they will have to rely even harder on captcha or they will be taken over by bots talking to other bots
- kneebonian 4y ago
  An interesting idea but really then aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent. The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because the voter agrees whereas what is unpopular gets down voted regardless of veracity because people like the way it sounds. Beyond that a once popular website or producer says or does something that offends the sensibilities of the internet crowd and then everyone goes and down votes their results because it violates the current ziegiest
  - ren_engineer 4y ago
    >aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent there are tons of ways to prevent that by weighting votes and only taking a random sample. SEO is basically a war where SEOs find a way to exploit Google's algorithm and Google tries to respond. Backlinks were Google's original solution to keyword spam that made other search engines suck, they didn't expect people would create entire sites or pay other websites to send links to them so they could rank higher. Backlinks were themselves considered to be "votes" for quality similar to citations in academia. The problem is the barrier to entry to make a site and link to it is high, so SEOs themselves are often the only ones to do it. Adding some sort of voting mechanism would allow actual readers to give an opinion on quality, although you'd probably see SEOs pay people to vote on their link via a VPN switching IPs, so only people with established Google accounts could be allowed to vote. Obviously its a huge challenge, which is why Google is worth hundreds of billions for even partially solving it
toddmorey 4y ago
So the interesting thing about these tools is that they don’t link to the sources or cite the sources but instead train on them to generate a new source. I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us.
- mason55 4y ago
  > I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us There have been some good Twitter threads about this. Basically, this is the last generation of AI to be trained with inputs that were ~100% human. It probably won't take long until the bulk of the content online is generated by AI, at which point it will just be an AI feedback loop. Any new concept, idea, technology, whatever, that doesn't already have a bunch of content about it will never have a guaranteed fully-human-written corpus to start from. Once there's a viable OpenAI competitor or two, it's probably only a matter of time until the AIs start an arms race to feed each other bad data. Tweak the model to generate subtly incorrect information, regenerate your training corpus in a way that it feeds into other AIs but ensures you ignore it, and now you're basically all the way back to having a few trusted "information gatekeepers".
  - nradov 4y ago
    This will in turn spawn a new research field and industry of automated AI content detection in order to filter out poisoned training data. Also expect to see web browsers incorporate that technology with some sort of rating or color code to flag pages that seem to be AI generated. It's going to be a real arms race.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Except at present we can also train classifiers that recognise GPT output, so ingressed text should be able to be filtered. https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ detects GPT2, but it still detects ChatGPT snippets most of the time, even though the algorithm has been improved and the training set is presumably quite different. That said, I did just generate a complete lie https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874757 using ChatGPT that scored 99.98% real on the detector, so adversaries can pre-filter too. Also interesting is that historical corpora (every existing corpus) of data becomes more valuable, because they are untainted.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
Sally's Baking Addiction is the only site you need, FWIW. Trust me on that!
gibspaulding 4y ago
Holy crap. I just got an account with OpenAI set up last night so I've been looking for interesting prompts to play with. Can't say I'm going to try the recipe, but this looks at least as good as most blog-spam recipe sites. Prompt: Write a recipe and blog post for onion soup. GPT3 Response: Onion soup is a classic comfort food that can be enjoyed at any time of year. It’s a simple and delicious dish that comes together quickly and is sure to satisfy even the pickiest of eaters. Plus, it’s a great way to use up any extra onions you may have lying around! Today, I’m going to share with you my favorite recipe for onion soup. To make this soup, you’ll need: -4 large onions, sliced -4 tablespoons butter -4 cups chicken broth -1 teaspoon dried thyme -Salt and pepper to taste First, melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until softened and lightly browned, about 8-10 minutes. Next, add the chicken broth, thyme, and salt and pepper. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes. Once the soup has simmered, it’s ready to serve. Ladle into bowls and enjoy with some crusty bread or a salad. Onion soup is a simple and delicious dish that’s sure to please the whole family.
- shagie 4y ago
  A bit ago, with the Watson craze, they tried to figure out what else it was good for. This Cocktail Concocted By IBM's Watson Isn't Half Bad - https://gizmodo.com/this-cocktail-concocted-by-ibms-watson-isnt-half-bad-1628174200 https://gizmodo.com/this-cocktail-concocted-by-ibms-watson-i... Would You Drink a Cocktail Invented By a Computer? How IBM’s Watson become the world’s most creative bartender https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ibms-watson-can-mix-mean-drink-180957043/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ibms-watson-can-mi... --- The reason that blogspam recipes are so common is that recipes have a special place in copyright law in that they aren't. https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protected-by-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html (and in particular https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf ) From circular 33: > A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for preparing a dish. In contrast, a recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity may be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover the written description or explanation of a process that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself. The registration will also not cover the activities described in the work that are procedures, processes, or methods of operation, which are not subject to copyright protection. And so, you can grab a recipe and be 100% sure that it isn't copyrighted. Then you can add some SEO text around it and some advertisements on the side and you've got yourself a page that you are sure that no legal department will come after you for.
otikik 4y ago
AI-generated First Aid instructions. AI-generated alternative cancer treatments. Hugh.
toss1 4y ago
THIS!! Whenever this technology is used in an accuracy-critical setting, it is a recipe for disaster. These "AI systems" produce the MOST PREDICTED output whenever there is any ambiguity, and this REPLACES the ACTUAL UNEXPECTED value/ITEM. In information system terms, they are literally stripping out content with the highest information value. I saw this first hand giving a deposition that was supposedly transcribed by an "Artificial Intelligence" system. The output looked beautiful, until I started checking it for errors. Normally an errata sheet has a dozen lines for errors. Mine had pages. And they were substantial and very meaningful. The most obvious site was a specific name that sounded vaguely similar (started with a "J" and "K" sounds) was replaced by "Jack Kennedy". It also replaced "you have" with "I have" and omitted "not" several times, literally reversing the meaning of the statement. There were 85+ errors that I caught, over an order of magnitude more than normal. These things are basically fine as glorified type-ahead systems where it doesn't matter much and a human is in the loop. But using them in any situation where the results are critical is, at this point, basically fraud. They do not do what the proponents claim.
beezlewax 4y ago
Bad input equals bad output. They've trained these models on poorly written content that's already been an issue itself.
dgb23 4y ago
Fun fact: Video games with crafting/cooking such as RPGs are featured on some of these generated SEO sites.
fattless 4y ago
Similarly, I have found a ton of beginner coding tutorials that contain mountains of useless/unrelated text. I bet a ton of it is SEO, but you gotta wonder if its just generated by something. Especially now that things like chatGPT seem to write coding tutorials pretty easy (with less bloat than the ones I find on google)
- jon_richards 4y ago
  Same! I was trying to figure out async diesel in rust and I couldn’t figure out why the tutorials weren’t working. There were several that had similar code snippets, but different (and sometimes nonsensical) explanations. Couldn’t get anything to compile. I finally found a GitHub repo that they all seemed to be stealing from and managed to figure out the missing parts.

cossatot 4y ago

It may be that the 21st century Turing test will be 'whether an AI can tell that content is AI generated". Otherwise it may be much harder to filter the AI-generated content.

jorgemf 4y ago

I think the problem you are describing is not only about AI, it is about trusting your sources of information. I can happen with content from humans.

acdha 4y ago
Yes - AI moves this to another level of scale but Google’s need to sell ad placements created the environment for that to work. When they can’t even be troubled to de-rank blatant StackExchange/GitHub/Wikipedia scrapers it created a big opportunity for these low-quality content farms limited only by their ability to generate content on every topic.
notart666 4y ago
Except for the fact that it does so on an unprecide dented scale allowing small groups of people to do things without necessarily being caught allowing for far more effective ways of control. Even without it, it's hard to argue for the existence of online forums when hackernews is a classic example of why it doesn't work when the majority of the 'intellectuals' have an inflated belief and understanding on topics they have no basic understand on. It's so bad that none of the actual subject matter experts talk here besides ones with financial interests in the products themselves and the experts fearful of retribution. The irony is almost comedic.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
I have cookbooks, both physical and in digital formats, but it's usually faster to do a web search, especially when I mostly need cooking time and temperature. Perhaps this will motivate me to finally get around the setting up a local search function for my electronic cookbook collection as the web is going to be less and less trustworthy.
- danuker 4y ago
  Firefox makes it pretty easy to add a custom search engine. That one could point to your local server instance. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch#autodiscovery_of_search_plugins https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch#auto...
- ginko 4y ago
  For all its flaws I find Youtube is one of the best sources for recipes these days. Especially when you search in the language of the country the dishes are from and use CC auto-translate.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    It's ironic that for all our cheering of democratization of creation, we turn back to gatekeeping (video harder to produce than text) in a search for quality. Although maybe that's more a comment on the inevitable end state of democratization of creation + centralization of search/discovery + monetization of traffic.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Why is it ironic? I think it's more of a "humans are unable to learn from history moment". Romans called it "the mob" because of the common problems that occurred when large groups of undirected people got together and chaos broke loose. Of course the opposite where the authoritarian leader ruled everything also lead to Rome burning. There is a happier middleground where multiple gates exist to filter out the bullshit, but no said gatekeeper controls the entire market leading to monopoly behavior.
Karunamon 4y ago
I have never encountered GPs problem where the recipe itself (the thing I was searching for) rather than the surrounding SEO fluff was AI generated trash. If this problem widely proliferates, especially into other domains, curation is going to become absolutely vital.
- wjholden 4y ago
  There's a lot of junk writing that may or may not be authored by humans about health and fitness. Search Google for "how to do more pull-ups" and you'll find thousands of long, meandering, trash articles of generic common sense with stock images and lots of ads on spammy domains.
PeterisP 4y ago
With content from humans, there has to be sufficient motivation to produce a significant quantity of coherent garbage (since it takes time and effort) which means that you can trust by default because intentionally generated garbage is rare unless the topic is one of the niches where there is motivation for it (e.g. politics, history related to politics, and sales). Like, sometimes people do put in exceptional effort to fabricate something as a practical joke, but that is sufficiently rare that you can ignore it in your daily life. Without AI-generated content, cookie recipes would be "safe" from that, since only people who care about cookies would bother to write up articles about them - but now you suddenly have to mistrust all sources of all information, which is a new thing.
- jorgemf 4y ago
  Create content with AI will be easier and faster, but it doesnt mean humans wont generate garbage. That is one of the main problems of the search engines. And as long as you can put ads in your content you can create any garbage and put ads there to make money, as long as the content sounds relevant for a lot of people. For me the main issue with AI creating content in internet is going to be the echo chamber of that content being used to train new AI models.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law The bullshit asymmetry principle puts forth that algorithmic 'bullshit' content is even worse as quantity is a quality all in itself when you're debunking the bullshit. In general the reader will not know if the producer of the bullshit is a real human or a bot. This makes the search engines job even harder as not only do you have the standard human bullshit you have to get rid of, you have an oceans torrent of AI generated bullshit that you have to waste energy on getting rid of. HN has a common theme of saying that "Dead internet theory is wrong", I personally just think they've not waited long enough and it's becoming more true every day.
  - tomatotomato37 4y ago
    It's the mass production that is the problem. A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care. Content farms won't trim down their 100 outsourced artists or writers to 10 curators; they will cut the stack completely, and just pipe whatever noise the AI generates straight into the commons. Even if 99.999% of it is complete nonsensical garbage, if they produce fast enough the remaining 0.001% of actually good content can still result in massive profits

hoosieree 4y ago

What's not to like? Custard? Good! Jam? Good! Meat? Good!

dmje 4y ago
Have an upvote as I lol into my soup :-)
ethbr0 4y ago
I would be very interested in your meat jam custard recipe. Asking for a friendly AI.
- mirekrusin 4y ago
  That's Joey from Friends [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSFgDZJVYbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSFgDZJVYbo
- capableweb 4y ago
  Here is my own favorite way of doing jam custard: > I am not able to provide a recipe for meat jam custard as I do not have the ability to access information on specific recipes. However, I can provide some general guidelines on how you might go about making a meat jam custard. > First, you will need to select a type of meat to use for the jam. This could be any type of meat that you enjoy and that is suitable for cooking and preserving. Some common options for meat jam include pork, beef, chicken, or lamb. > Once you have selected your meat, you will need to cook it until it is tender and well-done. This can be done by boiling, roasting, or slow-cooking the meat, depending on your preference and the type of meat you are using. > Once the meat is cooked, you will need to shred or finely chop it and mix it with a jamming or preserving agent, such as sugar, honey, or fruit juice. This will help to preserve the meat and give it a jam-like consistency. > Next, you will need to prepare a custard base for the meat jam. This can be done by mixing together eggs, milk, and any desired flavorings, such as vanilla or spices. > Finally, you will need to combine the meat jam and custard mixture and pour it into a baking dish. Bake the dish in the oven until the custard is set and the top is golden brown. > Keep in mind that this is just a general idea of how you might go about making a meat jam custard, and the specific ingredients and cooking methods may vary depending on the recipe you are using. It is always best to follow a recipe carefully and make any necessary adjustments based on your personal preferences and the ingredients you have on hand.

thanatos519 4y ago

The stories aren't just SEO-pandering. They're copyright-pandering: https://www.chatelaine.com/food/food-blog-recipe-storytelling/ https://www.chatelaine.com/food/food-blog-recipe-storytellin...

burkaman 4y ago

Can you link one? Sounds very interesting.

ghaff 4y ago

I guess I'm in the minority of actually appreciating a lot of the background. And it can't just be SEO given that cookbooks these days are hardly just lists of recipes for the most part and people do apparently buy them.

skeeter2020 4y ago
Absolutely, buying an actualy printed cook book is more than the recipes. I'm not sure the same thing is true for the 10M "Best Ever Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipes on the web.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I guess if I'm just looking for a recipe the text is easy enough to skip. Often there's even a jump to recipe button. But photos etc. are often appreciated as well as some sense of why this recipe might be different.
ajmurmann 4y ago
It's not just SEO it's also a requirement to get copyright protection
- ghaff 4y ago
  So? Someone else can (and often does) just copy the recipe. So if you don't think the rest of the content has any value, what has been gained by writing it? If I had a cooking site--which I don't--I'd certainly want to do more than just post recipes irrespective of monetary considerations.
DoughnutHole 4y ago
Well to me there's two distinct types of background: 1. Background directly related to the recipe/cooking in general. 2. The writer's personal anecdotes tangentially related to the recipe. Some cooking blogs have great background (eg. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's work on Serious Eats) but I would say they're mostly type 1 - information that informs you about the recipe, how they developed it, technique etc. They have type 2 background as well (jokes, what inspired them to make the recipe, snippets of their day-to-day lives) but it's definitely a small proportion of the body of the text. These blogs always have background that's work reading. What I can't stand is the blogs with reams and reams of text of nothing but personal anecdotes, meandering stories, media references, what their kids are up to etc etc, occasionally returning to talk about something to do with the recipe. I don't have any examples because I now avoid untrusted recipe blogs like the plague, but it becomes very obvious to me when a recipe blog strays from useful background to worthless padding for the sake of copyright and SEO.

ren_engineer 4y ago

there's a paper that basically shows these LLMs are pretty much tapped out in terms of quality data to train on, not sure if there are any legit architecture improvements in the works to improve results quality but it seems brute force training with more data may be about over - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04325.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.04325.pdf As for SEO, Google is going to have to stop being lazy and relying so much on backlinks and domain authority. They might have to consider allowing searchers to essentially vote on what they consider good. I don't see any other way low quality AI content doesn't dominate SERPs, established players will spin up entire sites and spam backlinks to them all. There are also people working on using AI to identify obvious AI content by finding patterns in the output which is probably our only hope. For social media and forums they will have to rely even harder on captcha or they will be taken over by bots talking to other bots

kneebonian 4y ago
An interesting idea but really then aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent. The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because the voter agrees whereas what is unpopular gets down voted regardless of veracity because people like the way it sounds. Beyond that a once popular website or producer says or does something that offends the sensibilities of the internet crowd and then everyone goes and down votes their results because it violates the current ziegiest
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  >aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent there are tons of ways to prevent that by weighting votes and only taking a random sample. SEO is basically a war where SEOs find a way to exploit Google's algorithm and Google tries to respond. Backlinks were Google's original solution to keyword spam that made other search engines suck, they didn't expect people would create entire sites or pay other websites to send links to them so they could rank higher. Backlinks were themselves considered to be "votes" for quality similar to citations in academia. The problem is the barrier to entry to make a site and link to it is high, so SEOs themselves are often the only ones to do it. Adding some sort of voting mechanism would allow actual readers to give an opinion on quality, although you'd probably see SEOs pay people to vote on their link via a VPN switching IPs, so only people with established Google accounts could be allowed to vote. Obviously its a huge challenge, which is why Google is worth hundreds of billions for even partially solving it

toddmorey 4y ago

So the interesting thing about these tools is that they don’t link to the sources or cite the sources but instead train on them to generate a new source. I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us.

mason55 4y ago
> I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us There have been some good Twitter threads about this. Basically, this is the last generation of AI to be trained with inputs that were ~100% human. It probably won't take long until the bulk of the content online is generated by AI, at which point it will just be an AI feedback loop. Any new concept, idea, technology, whatever, that doesn't already have a bunch of content about it will never have a guaranteed fully-human-written corpus to start from. Once there's a viable OpenAI competitor or two, it's probably only a matter of time until the AIs start an arms race to feed each other bad data. Tweak the model to generate subtly incorrect information, regenerate your training corpus in a way that it feeds into other AIs but ensures you ignore it, and now you're basically all the way back to having a few trusted "information gatekeepers".
- nradov 4y ago
  This will in turn spawn a new research field and industry of automated AI content detection in order to filter out poisoned training data. Also expect to see web browsers incorporate that technology with some sort of rating or color code to flag pages that seem to be AI generated. It's going to be a real arms race.
- robocat 4y ago
  Except at present we can also train classifiers that recognise GPT output, so ingressed text should be able to be filtered. https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ detects GPT2, but it still detects ChatGPT snippets most of the time, even though the algorithm has been improved and the training set is presumably quite different. That said, I did just generate a complete lie https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33874757 using ChatGPT that scored 99.98% real on the detector, so adversaries can pre-filter too. Also interesting is that historical corpora (every existing corpus) of data becomes more valuable, because they are untainted.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

Sally's Baking Addiction is the only site you need, FWIW. Trust me on that!

gibspaulding 4y ago

Holy crap. I just got an account with OpenAI set up last night so I've been looking for interesting prompts to play with. Can't say I'm going to try the recipe, but this looks at least as good as most blog-spam recipe sites. Prompt: Write a recipe and blog post for onion soup. GPT3 Response: Onion soup is a classic comfort food that can be enjoyed at any time of year. It’s a simple and delicious dish that comes together quickly and is sure to satisfy even the pickiest of eaters. Plus, it’s a great way to use up any extra onions you may have lying around! Today, I’m going to share with you my favorite recipe for onion soup. To make this soup, you’ll need: -4 large onions, sliced -4 tablespoons butter -4 cups chicken broth -1 teaspoon dried thyme -Salt and pepper to taste First, melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until softened and lightly browned, about 8-10 minutes. Next, add the chicken broth, thyme, and salt and pepper. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes. Once the soup has simmered, it’s ready to serve. Ladle into bowls and enjoy with some crusty bread or a salad. Onion soup is a simple and delicious dish that’s sure to please the whole family.

shagie 4y ago
A bit ago, with the Watson craze, they tried to figure out what else it was good for. This Cocktail Concocted By IBM's Watson Isn't Half Bad - https://gizmodo.com/this-cocktail-concocted-by-ibms-watson-isnt-half-bad-1628174200 https://gizmodo.com/this-cocktail-concocted-by-ibms-watson-i... Would You Drink a Cocktail Invented By a Computer? How IBM’s Watson become the world’s most creative bartender https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ibms-watson-can-mix-mean-drink-180957043/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ibms-watson-can-mi... --- The reason that blogspam recipes are so common is that recipes have a special place in copyright law in that they aren't. https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protected-by-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte... https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-protection-recipes/ https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html (and in particular https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf ) From circular 33: > A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for preparing a dish. In contrast, a recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity may be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover the written description or explanation of a process that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself. The registration will also not cover the activities described in the work that are procedures, processes, or methods of operation, which are not subject to copyright protection. And so, you can grab a recipe and be 100% sure that it isn't copyrighted. Then you can add some SEO text around it and some advertisements on the side and you've got yourself a page that you are sure that no legal department will come after you for.

otikik 4y ago

AI-generated First Aid instructions. AI-generated alternative cancer treatments. Hugh.

toss1 4y ago

THIS!! Whenever this technology is used in an accuracy-critical setting, it is a recipe for disaster. These "AI systems" produce the MOST PREDICTED output whenever there is any ambiguity, and this REPLACES the ACTUAL UNEXPECTED value/ITEM. In information system terms, they are literally stripping out content with the highest information value. I saw this first hand giving a deposition that was supposedly transcribed by an "Artificial Intelligence" system. The output looked beautiful, until I started checking it for errors. Normally an errata sheet has a dozen lines for errors. Mine had pages. And they were substantial and very meaningful. The most obvious site was a specific name that sounded vaguely similar (started with a "J" and "K" sounds) was replaced by "Jack Kennedy". It also replaced "you have" with "I have" and omitted "not" several times, literally reversing the meaning of the statement. There were 85+ errors that I caught, over an order of magnitude more than normal. These things are basically fine as glorified type-ahead systems where it doesn't matter much and a human is in the loop. But using them in any situation where the results are critical is, at this point, basically fraud. They do not do what the proponents claim.

beezlewax 4y ago

Bad input equals bad output. They've trained these models on poorly written content that's already been an issue itself.

dgb23 4y ago

Fun fact: Video games with crafting/cooking such as RPGs are featured on some of these generated SEO sites.

fattless 4y ago

Similarly, I have found a ton of beginner coding tutorials that contain mountains of useless/unrelated text. I bet a ton of it is SEO, but you gotta wonder if its just generated by something. Especially now that things like chatGPT seem to write coding tutorials pretty easy (with less bloat than the ones I find on google)

jon_richards 4y ago
Same! I was trying to figure out async diesel in rust and I couldn’t figure out why the tutorials weren’t working. There were several that had similar code snippets, but different (and sometimes nonsensical) explanations. Couldn’t get anything to compile. I finally found a GitHub repo that they all seemed to be stealing from and managed to figure out the missing parts.