Don’t let artificial intelligence (AI) mush ruin your New Year’s Eve dinner. Because the tide of AI content that has been flooding the web for months is coming to the table this holiday season. It threatens all recipes, from turkey to Thanksgiving American with the no less traditional Quebecois tourtière.
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“I didn’t get this recipe from any site,” assures ChatGPT when asked for his best tourtière recipe. “It is an original recipe, based on my general knowledge of traditional Quebec cuisine and on proven culinary techniques. »
Reassured? Not everyone would be. We are ready to forgive it for confusing the tourtière and the meat pie, but the AI is not only potentially bad. It can be downright dangerous.
In recent days, American media have reported cases of aberrant recipes that pose direct risks to health. Insufficient cooking times for poultry which poses the risk of salmonellosis, for example. Or inconsistent, even downright toxic, spice blends.
Some tantalizing images show dishes that are impossible to replicate. They are as wrong as the recipe.
A high-risk New Year’s Eve?
Imagine the scene. You follow a recipe found at the top of Google results. The dough does not rise. The meat is dry. The taste is strange. You have wasted time and money. Your holiday meal is ruined. All this because of a text generated in a few seconds by an anonymous computer server.
It’s a high-risk New Year’s Eve. It is the fault of what we call in English the “ Back up slop ”, or “AI mush”. In the United States, on the occasion of Thanksgiving, or Thanksgivingmillions of Americans have tasted it by relying on recipes for their turkey found on Google.
Search results are saturated with bot-generated recipes. Recipes sometimes invented from scratch by the algorithms of OpenAI, Google and others.
Quebec is not immune. The wave of “porridge” overflows the borders like the brown sauce in the saucier. AI overcomes the language barrier effortlessly.
When we talk about generative AI to Marilou Bourdon, from the site Trois fois par jour, she admits that she “panicked a little” a few months ago. It has since returned. It says it has taken back the revenue lost due to the drop in visits to its site caused by generative AI in the sale of its products.
We cannot control what content these AIs produce, but we can adapt, she concludes.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Marilou Bourdon
“We have to accept the reality, these AIs exist, but there are areas where we cannot replace humans,” she says. Cooking is one such area. The late Daniel Pinard would not have said otherwise.
Marilou only publishes tested and verified recipes. Her photos are authentic, so much so that the weather affects the photo shoot schedule. “We have an internal team and I wouldn’t change that for anything in the world,” assures the woman who, as a musician, also rubs shoulders with AI on music platforms.
“I can’t believe we’re here, it’s going really fast. »
A taste of clickbait
The problem is that generative AI is a series of algorithms that do nothing but predict the next word in a sentence (or the next note in a song). She doesn’t understand chemistry. She ignores physics. She has no taste buds.
A human knows that garlic burns quickly. A human knows that baking soda is not baking powder. The AI doesn’t know this. She hallucinates his instructions.
Its content is not verified by a human, but it gets people clicking. “It’s a starting point to learn more about a recipe,” Google responds to Bloomberg on this subject.
Cooking is a popular topic on the internet. Advertising revenues are high there. Robots produce thousands of recipes per day. Google is not its first AI recipe: last year Gemini proposed adding glue to pizzas to make their cheese runnier.
The user hopes to get an authentic recipe, or perhaps they hope that the AI will reproduce a chef’s recipe published on their own website? Even then, a culinary disaster is likely. Google’s AI is baking a popular Christmas cake from American blogger Eb Gargano so long that it would “end up in ashes”, she warns on Bloomberg.
In short, letting AI dictate your holiday menu might not be a gift.
